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Knights Armament sr25
Eugene Morrison Stoner was born in Gosport, Indiana, on 22 November 1922. He passed away in Palm City, Florida, in 1997. In the intervening 74 years, Stoner established himself as the most successful American firearms designer of the modern age.
When Stoner graduated from High School in 1939, his parents could not afford to send him to college. Instead, he took a job as a machinist with the Vega Aircraft Company. Vega ultimately morphed into Lockheed, which then became Lockheed Martin. They build F-35s and C-130s today.
With war clearly on the horizon, Stoner joined the Marines. He served in the Pacific Theater as an armorer working on large-caliber automatic weapons. Along the way, he developed an abiding passion for firearms. This guy was a born gun nerd.
Though he never attended college or trained as an engineer, Gene Stoner obviously had a gift for mechanical things. After the war, he took a job in the machine shop for Whittaker Controls Inc., a company that produced aircraft components. In short order, he became their principal Design Engineer.
Foundations
George Sullivan worked as a patent lawyer for Lockheed. Charles Dorchester was his brother-in-law. They were gun nerds, too.
Sullivan and Dorchester set about incorporating aviation engineering and materials science that had emerged from the recent global war into the world of small arms. Their first project was a fairly pedestrian bolt-action hunting rifle that incorporated exotic-for-the-day fiberglass, stainless steel, and aluminum components. They called their revolutionary lightweight rifle the AR-1 Para-Sniper. You’ve got to give them credit for cool points.
These two men met Richard Boutelle through an acquaintance at a trade show. Boutelle was a veteran of the U.S. Army Air Corps and also a fellow gun nerd. Coincidentally, Boutelle was also the president of Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation. They built the C-119 and C-123 cargo aircraft and, eventually, the famed A-10 Warthog ground attack plane. Fairchild had some proper resources.
With Richard Boutelle’s patronage, they founded a tiny small arms design group under the overarching umbrella of Fairchild. The company was housed in a small machine shop on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. It’s hard to imagine that you could once design and build guns in California, but these were obviously different times.
Serendipity
One April afternoon in 1954, George Sullivan was out testing a prototype firearm at the Topanga Canyon Shooting Range.
Gene Stoner was at the same range just turning ammunition into noise. These two guys struck up a conversation that blossomed into a friendship. Sullivan hired Stoner on the spot. He was the company’s ninth employee.
Gene Stoner designed several weapons for the company, including the AR-3, AR-5, AR-9, AR-11, and AR-12. The US Air Force bought a few AR-5s as aircrew survival rifles, but none of the others amounted to much. Then the heavens opened up, and angels began singing.
In 1955, Stoner crafted his masterwork. The 7.62x51mm AR-10 combined cutting-edge materials science with several existing revolutionary gun designs. The direct gas impingement system came from the Swedish AG-42 Ljungman rifle. The in-line geometry wherein the recoil vector traveled directly from the bore into the firer’s shoulder was simply the clever application of fundamental physics. The AR-10 changed the way the world looked at tactical guns.
You all know the rest of the story already. The 7.62mm AR-10 morphed into the 5.56mm AR-15, which begat the M16, which became the M4. Along the way, Springfield Armory adapted the basic design into its superlative line of SAINT modern sporting rifles.
The M16 in all its sundry forms is the longest-serving combat rifle in American history. The AR-15 is the most popular civilian rifle in America. It’s quite a legacy.
Details
Uncle Sam wasn’t terribly keen on the AR-10 early on. There was a tepid effort to include the AR-10 alongside the T44 and T48, guns that became the M14 and the FN FAL, during the U.S. Army service rifle trials back in the 1950s. However, there was a burst barrel in the AR-10, and it fell out of the running. The tech was not quite mature by then.
The geniuses behind the AR-10 never intended to mass-produce guns. They were a think tank. Their mission was to design cutting-edge combat guns that could then be licensed to existing production facilities. Their first serious deal was with a Dutch company called Staatsbedrijf Artillerie Inrichtingen.
Please don’t ask me how to pronounce that. However, these guys had the means to make weapons in respectable quantities. The Dutch AR-10 production ran for five years in the early 1960s. About 5,000 of these early AR-10s entered service with Portuguese Paratroopers.
Most of these guns saw action in Africa. By all accounts, these radically advanced battle rifles performed swimmingly. However, not a lot of them survived to come home.
A Fortuitous Turn of Events
There’s a Biblical parable in the book of Matthew that reads, “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.”
It’s an admittedly awkward analogy, but I live on sites like GunBroker.com. GunBroker is like the world’s biggest gun show running 24/7. One day, while surfing around, something unusual caught my eye.
The rifle in question was the world’s most expensive repurposed parts gun. The parts kit started as one of those original Dutch AR-10 service rifles made back in the 1950s.
Some enlightened individual imported the demilled gun and then built it up again on what appears to be a one-off lower receiver. I had never seen one before.
I didn’t have a great deal of money at the time, but I knew I would likely never see one of these again. I emptied the piggy bank and searched under the couch cushions for spare change, and eventually made this gun mine. It is indeed a treasure.
Particulars
In this old Dutch AR-10, you can see vestiges of greatness. The gun is in excellent shape. The internal components are all hard chromed, something that should have carried over to those Vietnam-era M-16s. The charging handle is a trigger-like appendage located inside the carry handle that does not reciprocate with the action. Pressing the charging handle down locks it to the bolt carrier, functioning as a forward assist device.
The rear sight is drum-adjustable for elevation in the manner of later M-16A2 sights. The front sight blade is generously fenced. The controls are all right where we might expect them to be.
The gas system can be disabled to fire rifle grenades, and the bayonet mounts on top of the barrel. The buffer system mimics that of a modern AR-10, and the gun feeds from lightweight waffle-pattern aluminum 20-round box magazines.
The furniture was formed from foam-filled phenolic polymer with some stamped steel bits added for strength. The sling swivels were mounted on the left side of the rifle rather than the bottom.
The lower receiver on my gun seems crude compared to the rest of it. Curiously, the upper receiver sports English-style pressure-proof data. Unlike that of an M4, the hammer is driven by a coil spring.
Ruminations
Gene Stoner’s very first AR-10 eventually set in motion a sequence of events that led to some 30 million or so AR-variants in service today. That legacy has carried over to some of today’s finest rifles, like the SAINT 5.56mm and 7.62mm firearms, to name just a few.
Like that treasure in the field, when I saw this one come up for sale, I knew I simply had to make it mine. Hefting this amazing old gun is like having my hands on history. And what a history it is.
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Pak-40 German 75mm AT Gun Firing
This is the sad fate of a continent that has bet on its own demise. It wanted to be the great regulator and beacon of the world but is instead committing suicide homeopathically.
Family photo of European authorities during an event for Ukraine.
In recent years (and more recently in the Trump era), strategic and international affairs experts have spent tons of ink and paper trying to predict what the world would be like without America. Diplomatic gurus, prestigious essayists, former political leaders, and reputable publishers have dedicated blood, sweat and money to warn of all the bad things that lay ahead for Europeans when Washington looked the other way, over their heads, or retreated into itself.
Titles like “The Return of the Jungle” or “The End of the West” or “A World Without America” illustrate this trend.
But we have to admit that these attempts at warning and, at the same time, expressions of fear, have turned out to be all wrong. What we are experiencing in Donald Trump’s second term is not America’s retreat into strategic introspection.
Let them tell that to Khamenei or Maduro without going any further. Nor is it strategically a languishing of the West towards irrelevance. Today, America is stronger, richer and better prepared for today’s technological revolution than it was four years ago.
No. What the pundits have been unable or unwilling to see, possibly motivated by their excess of mental Eurocentrism, is the reality of the situation:
It is not America that is leaving the world, it is Europe, in fact, that is leaving it.
Instead of writing about a world without America, it would have been better if they had thought about a world without Europe. They would have better prepared us for the challenges that all Europeans have to face.
First of all, Europe has a serious military problem for which it has no solution: Ukraine. Eager to satisfy Joe Biden, they launched into a rhetorical escalation of support for Zelensky to the end and, logically, of confrontation with the Kremlin, without having the will or ability to deliver on their promises.
Without the United States—and Zelensky knows this well—Ukraine is lost. But E.U. leaders keep talking as if they are ready to launch us into World War III, except that they have neither the weapons nor the soldiers to wage it.
But instead of seeking a de-escalation in rhetoric and accepting the inevitable, that only Donald Trump could force a peace agreement, however painful it might be for Ukraine, Europe continues to jump on the bandwagon of bellicosity, putting fear into its population and painting apocalyptic scenarios but little else.
Secondly, Europe has a very serious social problem that dates back decades but has been especially aggravated by the nefarious decisions of the person who was considered to be the beacon of Europe, Chancellor Angela Merkel.
And that problem has a name and last name: uncontrolled immigration and Islamism.
There is no country or city that does not suffer an increase of an Islamist religious minority and that does not try to impose its rules on traditional European traditions and beliefs.
We see it every day in the crime figures and, very particularly, in the attacks against the integrity and safety of women. But we have also just suffered it this past Christmas with the multiple attacks on Christian symbols and in the places where families usually spend these days, Christmas markets and public squares.
It is not surprising that the new U.S. security strategy warns that if Europe does not change course by 2040, it will no longer be Europe.
Third, Europe suffers from a serious problem of economic and technological backwardness. Instead of being a paradise of development, it has only known how to regulate and regulate until it completely suffocates any hint of innovation.
It is neither in the A.I. race, nor in space, nor in energy. The fight against the big American tech companies and the E.U.’s eagerness to tax them, more a product of its own impotence than of a desire for retributive justice, drives the Old Continent further and further away from the future.
Worse still, the fear of American abandonment, if not disgust at the figure of President Trump, leads to a suicidal embrace of China, as if electric cars from Xi Jinping did not come burdened with totalitarianism and desires for global domination. As long as the E.U. bureaucracy remains the dominant source of industrial legislation, European nations are doomed to fail.
Fourth, Europe is a prisoner of its bad energy decisions and its commitment to the so-called “energy transition,” which was supposed to put Europe at the forefront of decarbonization.
What was never said is that in addition to the trillion-dollar bill for that step, the whole scheme rested on guaranteed access to Russian gas and liquefied natural gas from the Gulf. The confrontation with Russia and the sanctions closed that access and the taxes on hydrocarbons of all kinds threaten the main supplier, Qatar, to stop selling to Europe.
Either the E.U. gives up its ambitious energy agenda or it runs out of energy. There are no other options.
For the moment, it has already backtracked on the ban on combustion cars set for 2030, just around the corner. The allergy to nuclear power fueled by Merkel and the entire European left doesn’t help either.
Finally, Europe has a serious political problem. Having been created as the paradise on earth of freedom and welfare, its continuous problems in making its promises a reality have led to growing authoritarianism, an institutional system that tends to fortify the establishment and to condemn any other option that does not agree with what has been called the “social democratic consensus,” namely less nation, more State, more taxes, more regulation and more social control.
But if all that seemed to be accepted by citizens, it was in exchange for two vital things: security and prosperity. None of that is offered today.
On the contrary, Europeans are becoming less rich and more poor and feel assaulted on their soil and threatened by another foreseeable great war. Without a change in the continent’s political elites, it is very difficult for Europe to emerge from the current impasse.
Unfortunately, E.U. leaders are hellbent on preventing such a change. Hence their growing authoritarianism and their disdain for the deep values of democracy. Spain is a particularly acute case in this area, as its current prime minister has transformed Spanish democracy into a completely hollow shell of values and respect for democratic procedures.
But the United Kingdom is going in the same direction, not to mention France and Germany. People are being arrested for praying in the street, but only if they are Christians; people are being fined and imprisoned for giving opinions contrary to government policies because any criticism is judged a hate crime, especially if it deals with immigration.
It aspires to judicially eliminate opposition leaders outside the establishment and promotes the illegalization of parties that are not part of the grand consensus born after World War II.
But while this incipient “cold civil war” is taking place, Europe has become invisible as an actor in the rest of the world. It is not a player in the Middle East (for the better); it aligns itself against dictatorial change (see statements on the capture of Maduro or on the Iranian regime); and it believes that by getting cocky in front of its main ally, the United States, it becomes stronger. In Moscow and Beijing, there must be many people laughing loudly.
And worst of all, a world without America would be uninhabitable, but a world without Europe would hardly suffer.
This is the sad fate of a continent that has bet on its own demise. It wanted to be the great regulator and beacon of the world but is instead committing suicide homeopathically, all while the rest of the world yawns indifferently.