I built 2 AR's for hunting now.
It started back in the '70s when I bought an HK91 and mounted an Aimpoint on it. Good deer rifle, but a bit heavy and long. Tried bolts and levers, but the bang around factor in the field wasn't all that, and not being able to just keep my eyes on the target and shoot again lost deer.
I heard a lot of other manual action shooters having the same problem - follow up shots weren't rapid or accurate. I decided to go back to a self loading action.
Built the first as a 16" in 6.8 - still not convince the 5.56 was all that, despite 22 years shooting it in the Army Reserves. I was convinced the AR was a good answer to a lot of hunting situations - not only the second shot speed and improved accuracy, but also safety. You can drop the mag and retract the BCG, it's empty. Open the bolt on a manual action gun, it's got to be cycled or fooled with to unload, and it presents issues. How many bolt guns are reported "going off" when they are unloaded, or when the operator closes the action cycling "that round?" Too many. Plenty blame the gun, nobody takes responsibility that you are repeatedly jacking rounds thru the chamber to do it. And each of those have to feed, with the resulting dings and dents on the cartridge.
This is where the safety mavens who hate AR's have no clue - it's inherently less risky in use, exactly when it needs to be, unloading to safely cross barriers in the field. You don't ever chamber a round cycling ammo from the AR to clear it. :banghead:
I've mentioned it more than once over the years and all I hear after that is crickets. I don't see people suing over it - unlike, say, the Remington 700? (I own one, too. I'm not sending it back anytime soon.)
With all the positive experience with the HK, and the years of carrying the M16 in the field for training, plus hunting with the bolt and lever action, it really seems to be a no brainer. Yet I understand there are those who don't see the advantages.
The second AR I built was a 10.5" pistol. For deer hunting. Same terrain, where I had used .30-06, .308, .30-30, and 6.8. Others I've hunted with used 8mm Rem Mag, 7.62x54 Russian, 12 ga, or 8mm Mauser. I plotted the deer taken over 40 years and they were all under 80m - the maximum ethical range for 5.56 out of a 10.5" barrel. It still has about 1,000 foot pounds of force at that range.
If I'm targeting deer in woodland and dense cover at less than 80m and hitting them, along with a good representation of other hunters, I had to ask why I was using a gun 2 pounds heavier with the capacity to hit three times further? It results in me having to snake a 40" rifle thru the brush to see a flagging whitetail, rather than target it more quietly with the shorter gun.
MO allows any centerfire cartridge - take one example, the .32 ACP. Really. If you were using it, you would be still hunting or in a blind within the range of where you could ethically use it, and be successful. Even if you had a sharp stick - and there IS a season in MO for that - you'd hunt within your limits.
I've been hunting within my limits for 40 years, I just had a lot more gun than I needed. A 25 1/2" AR pistol actually fits the job more precisely. In 5.56.
You might be scouting bean fields and looking at 250m shots - and a handgun wouldn't be the better choice for that. Same here - seeing and shooting deer that are within iron sight distance doesn't require a sniper rifle with scope. You match the gun and cartridge to the job at hand.
5.56 is more than adequate for the job, it's that those who don't like it - like me in the past - were trying to assign jobs to it that weren't part of what it was meant to do. Conversely, taking large rifles to do a short range job is asking too much, too. I have and over time the lesson has sunk in.
