While any number of cultural mullahs tries to re-stoke a controversy over guns (is Switzerland safe? Males are required to own guns there) and doesn’t seem to understand that calling everything ‘an assault rifle’ just makes them look uninformed, the US Army wants to create a real assault rife. Except smaller. And semi-automatic.
Sniper rifles are behemoths and, if you are not an experienced shooter, I discourage you from firing something like a .50 caliber more than once. Once seems to be okay for people but casual shooters who fire the things twice tend to get queasy.
The Army wants to make a more user-friendly sniper rifle, the compact kind, for a designated shooter at the squad level. So the hunt for the M110 Compact Semi-Automatic Sniper System is on.
If you want to get rich being a military contractor, here is what you need to know; a lobbyist. Who will quickly tell you sniper rifles will not make you rich because the military only spends about $10 million a year on sniper rifles – unless you are convinced they are really giving these to every squad in the military instead of 700 people. However, if having a lobbyist does not discourage you, you then need to match military specifications and hope someone in the government did not already write the spec so that only one company with a good lobbyist can match it. It needs to be:
Semi-automatic. Naturally, you can’t snipe on full auto.
9 lbs. But without ammo or optics. An M107, for example, weighs 29 lbs. with a scope so that is really dragging some iron around.
7.62 x 51mm NATO cartridges – basically a .308, suitable for hunting. What the anti-gun people miss when declaring that ‘assault rifles’ are illegal for hunting so no one should have them is that they are illegal for hunting because they are too small, not because they are too dangerous. An AR-15 (or the knockoff the goofy neuroscience grad student in Colorado used) is essentially a .22. Fine for sport shooting or home defense, though a pistol would seem to make more sense. Yet no anti-gun people support pistols.
36 inches with the stock at its short position and without a sound suppressor. The M107 is 57 inches.
There you have it. Should you read this and get rich building the new rifle, please send a big trampoline to my office as a way of saying thanks.