AR-15s aren’t that good

I own a few AR-15s and they’re fantastic rifles, but they aren’t *that* great. A lot of people seem to think of them as some sort of perfection incarnate. <br><br>Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fantastic gun: Incredibly reliable, durable, and cheap. But it’s not like every other gun manufacturer have just given up on engineering better guns. <br><br>The G36 and ACR were precursors for what the AR should have been. But the US Military basically said “Nah, this is too expensive, we’ll just stick to the M4”. <br><br>I really like the ACR for example. It’s basically a much better AR for $2300. The real problem is that in order to make a mass produced AR-15 style rifle that’s reliably functional and easy to maintain you have to have a full engineering team, a factory, a supply chain, and a massive amount of capital. <br><br>I really hate seeing “Oh I put a suppressor on this thing and it worked perfect!”. But then you realize that it’s an $800 can on a $600 80% lower plus a $300 upper, where the barrel was probably replaced by a $200 aftermarket barrel. That’s a $1700 rifle, when a g36 or an fs2000 can do the exact same thing and yet everyone seems to be in love with the AR. <br><br>My biggest issue is that people buy into the idea that it’s the best rifle possible in this day and age. It’s not. The AR platform is better than anything in the 1960s, but it’s not better than anything made in the 2000s. Unfortunately the development of guns is so slow due to it being quite a capital intensive market, so I don’t really see the AR-15 being dethroned anytime soon. And yes, I know that the US didn’t adopt the ACR into service, but the ACR does a lot of things better than an AR. <br><br>&#x200B;