I meant the rifle has undergone 60 years of development to tune it around the available .223/5.56 rounds.
This sure sounds great, but this isn’t true either. Our industry has modified a lot about what an AR can look like in the last decade, but there’s nothing which has really changed or “developed” about how the AR-15 operates. I’ve built, rebuilt, and repaired literally hundreds of AR’s over more than 20 years, spanning all eras of production and “development.” The gas systems, chambers, reciprocating masses, etc - the rifles are NOT “developing” or being “tuned around the available 223/5.56 rounds.”
Nobody offers the advice - “if you’re buying a Remington 700, get it in 257 Roberts, 270win, or 30-06, because there has been over 80 years of development to tune the 700 to those cartridges.” Because 1) it’s not true, and 2) it’s non-sequitur - so the advice is instead, “get a Rem 700 in whatever cartridge best suits your application.”
Bluntly - I started working on AR’s in the late 1990’s when I began a gunsmith apprenticeship, recognizing the Federal AWB was already on the books for 4 years. Also recognizing, civilian AR’s really were not common before the AWB, and most of them were in VERY basic designs - tons of A1 and A2 clones. During that era, much of our “development” was redesigning the exterior to look like a banned rifle, including banned features, but without actually satisfying the ban criteria. Also, many of us were working on meeting the increasing market desire for free-floating handguards and Adjustable Gas Blocks - my personal solution was to offer service to cut A2 sight towers and drill and tap A2 “FSB’s” to make them adjustable, or for a higher cost, I made my own AGB’s, and to service the float tube market, I had a machine shop in town making barrel nuts and I was ordering aluminum and carbon fiber tube stock, cutting to length and milling slots, essentially replicating the round float tubes on the market at the time for about 1/4 of the price at my door and 2/3 the price to the customer. We we’re doing diddly-piss to tune the rifles to the 223/5.56 round, we were tuning them to look and feel how customers wanted - on the OUTSIDE. Most of the rifles I touched during the 1998-2004 era, those which I had not built myself, were repair or rebuild jobs for rifles from the ‘70s and ‘80s - and fast forwarding through working 2 decades on rifles spanning ~50 years out of the 60 the AR has been produced, there’s no development being made to “tune” the AR-15 to the 223/5.56 cartridge. I can swap parts made yesterday into rifles built 50+ years ago, and they’ll all run the same.
Also occurring during the ban, we saw the first instance of a SAAMI standardized non-223/5.56 “AR-15 cartridge,” and its highly popular competition, the 6.8 SPC and the 6.5 Grendel, respectively. In 5yrs prior, I had only built maybe a handful of AR’s in non-223/5.56 cartridges; in simple stuff like 17 Rem, 20 practical, or 6-223, and a few guys scratched at the 50 Beowulf, but the standardization of the 6.8 changed the market. Followed swiftly by the 204 Ruger, then the 300blk, the snowball accelerated quickly, and now we have new gas system lengths and new buffer systems which are true functional “developments” for tuning the AR design to different cartridge designs, and really weren’t driven by the 223/5.56.
So again, it sounds good, but man, you’re missing the mark with that claim.
What it sounds like to me: YOU believe the 223/5.56 should be the default choice for the AR-15, because YOU see the AR-15 through a narrow lens of purpose. But maybe you might consider - we’ve been redesigning the AR-15 for at least 24 years to be more versatile (inception of the wildcat 50 Beowulf) than the 223/5.56 because the consumer market WANTS more than 223/5.56, and an entire class of 2.3” cartridges has evolved in that time to meet those market desires.
No other firearm has successfully defined a cartridge class derived specifically for its use in modern history. This ain’t 1914 and you ain’t Henry Ford, and AR-15 customers have known for a couple decades now that they aren’t stuck buying an AR “in any cartridge they like, as long as it’s 5.56/223.”
