GunsAmerica Product Reviews – Rifles

We always get the question on AR-15 articles, “do they make one that is California legal?” The answer is yes, many companies do make California legal guns, and Armalite, the original “AR” in AR-15, is the latest to offer a series of guns specifically addressing statutory requirements in The People’s Republic of California. It is a Cali-legal version of their very popular Special Purpose Rifle (SPR), Mod-1, and despite the limitations built into the gun because of the California statutes, it is a beast of an AR with all the key features you would want in a high quality M4 sized carbine for tactical work, personal defense and3-Gun competition. The monolithic upper is unique in that the bottom three Picatinny rails on the quad are all replaceable for flat or half flat sections, and it comes with the extra sections so you can choose your configuration. Armalite has carved a niche for themselves in the new AR-15 market by offering only guns with high end features, and this gun is the flagship of their line, now Cali legal. The SPR Mod-1 carries an MSRP of $1,554, and comes standard with a chrome lined barrel, two stage trigger and hard coat matching finish, as well as the patented hardened Armalite bolt. Now Californians can buy the same gun as the rest of us, made legal for the arcane laws of their state, and the mods are easily reversible if those laws are ever changed. The SPR Mod-1 from Armalite is all you could want in an AR, made legal for California.

Muzzleloaders are very different from every other type of hunting rifle. Most hunters consider them ancillary, because the extra two weeks of muzzleloader season are meant to put you at a disadvantage. You get one shot at the deer, and you are forced to use what is considered by many to be a substandard weapon. Some states even have laws that you cannot use optics, putting older hunters and an even further disadvantage, and many states have quirky little laws to exclude certain advanced features that have crept into the modern muzzleloader market. Couple all of that with the fact that you can have a muzzleloader shipped to your door from online in most states, and you get a muzzleloader market that is something of a mess. Many small gunshops don’t even stock new muzzleloaders, so a lot of hunters end up settling for what’s on the shelf at Walmart. Fortunately we found that this isn’t such a bad thing. We bought two muzzleloaders and all of the stuff to shoot them in one trip to our local Walmart in Okeechobee, Florida, and the results were surprising. For about $350, with the scopes, both of these guns rivaled centerfire rifle accuracy, and proved that even the most inexpensive modern muzzleloaders aren’t substandard at all. If you are thinking of buying a muzzleloader at Walmart this week for your states special early season, have no fear. Walmart muzzleloaders totally rock!

Somehow, in preparation for the first article in this series on ordering M1 Garand rifles from the Civilian Marksmanship Program, we missed the least expensive of the bunch. They are called “Field Grade” Garands, and at $525 (plus $24.95 S&H), they seem to be a great buy. We ordered both the Springfield Armory and Harrington & Richardson (HRA) versions of these guns, and the Winchester is no longer available. Of all the Garands we have ordered from CMP so far, if you are looking for a Garand to just shoot and enjoy, you can’t do any better for the money than these field grade guns. Look around in gunshops and online and you will be hard pressed to find a nice looking and shooting Garand for under $600. Even at live auctions these days more Garands go for upwards of a thousand bucks. These “cheapest Garands” are a real find, and you order them directly from the CMP, just as we described in the first installment of this series. Our guns came in less than three weeks, each with its own hard plastic CMP case, and certification paperwork. Who knows when these guns will dry up, so if you are thinking long, heavy boxes under your Christmas tree this year, now would be the time to order.

When you already make the biggest and baddest sniper rifles in the world it would be easy to just rest on what you have already accomplished. My thinking, and probably most people’s thinking, would ask, “why mess with the good thing.” But that is exactly what Barrett has done by completely redesigning the M107A1, and introducing an entirely new rifle. the MRAD, to the shooting public.

We got a chance to actually go shoot these guns for a day with Ben Becker, our resident US Army Sniper. Ben has shot the original Model 82A1/M107 in combat on many occasions, but the updated, lighter version was a treat in civilian life, and the MRAD is just one of those rifles that you want to shoot as soon as you see it, and shoot them both we did.
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If you could make a list of all the things wrong with the AK-47 platform, what would it be? First off you probably would say the stock is too short. The trigger is lousy, and you never know if you bought a gun made of old, worn out parts. There are also little annoying things, like getting the dust cover back once you take it off, and it is a pain to shoot an AK at the range because the bolt doesn’t stay open. The AK is also known of course for not being accurate. “It’s a spray and pray gun.” All of these things are true to some degree, and all of them have been fixed in a new Zastava PAP build of the AK-47 currently being imported by Century Arms. It is still an AK-47 of course, but we found this gun to be the absolute best of the AK bunch, and it held up to legendary AK reliability when we threw it in the pond and covered it with muck. The $700-800 street price Zastava PAP from Century is a brand new gun made from brand new parts, and is about as much gun as you are going to get in a true AK-47. In the wake of the floods of Isaac, if you are going to strap one rifle to your back, for who knows what’s next, the Zastava PAP is a good option.

The quest for the ultimate .22 has found an unexpected home in Minnesota at Magnum Research, Inc., creators of the most popular movie gun of all time, the Desert Eagle. You wouldn’t expect Magnum Research to be the new leader in cutting edge .22LR, .22WMR and at some point even .17HMR firearms. But these days Magnum Research is home to not only their famous handguns, but also a patented graphite barrel technology called Magnum Lite® . What makes these barrels unique is that the graphite fibers are unidirectional, parallel to the bore axis. The result are barrels that are six times more rigid than steel of the same weight and that dissipate heat 43% faster than steel. Magnum Research is taking the custom rimfire market to a whole new level by producing a whole line of these guns in various calibers, and they have carried the technology to full sized centerfire calibers as well.

Deer season is right around the corner, and for those of us who are fortunate to be able to hunt with a rifle, the Browning X-Bolt should be in the top of the list if you are in the market for a new bolt gun. It is an exquisite example of everything a high quality traditional deer rifle should be, and it performs flawlessly. We thought it would be interesting to test a left-handed model for a change, even though we don’t have a left-handed shooter here. Lefty guns are an important part of the firearms market that are often ignored. You can’t get all guns in a left-handed configuration, so for the 10% of us out there who are lefties, it helps to know when a gun is really good and also comes in left hand. Our Browning X-Bolt test gun is the X-Bolt Hunter type, in .30-06 with a 22″ barrel and low gloss, drop dead gorgeous walnut stock. The MSRP is $919 and street price slightly less. It weighs 6 3/4 lbs. empty, and the left hand model is available in 16 calibers from .223 to .338 Win. Mag.

If you stop by just about any outdoor gun range in America on a Sunday, you will find any number of tricked out tactical rifles driving tacks at 100 yards and more. Generally these are custom rifles and some have a detachable box style magazine along with other high end, law enforcement-type features. Savage Arms, the industry leader in out of the box notoriously accurate rifles, has integrated these and other custom style features into their new Model 10 FCP-SR. It comes in .308 Winchester and has a free-floated heavy fluted barrel threaded for a suppressor, set in a digital camo simplified version of the Savage Accustock . The drilled and tapped receiver is supplied with a pre-mounted 20MOA one piece Picatinny base. It comes with a ten round detachable box magazine and a Savage Accutrigger. This makes for a gun just under 9 pounds that leaves little to be desired. The MSRP is $1213, and if you can find one, the street price is well under that. For an out of the box law enforcement style sniper rifle you couldn’t really ask for much more.

Never underestimate a legend, and that legend is Colt. At first glance you would think that the Colt 901 is just a .308 Win./7.62 NATO version of a standard AR-15, much like any other .308 AR out there, but it is a lot more than that. The Colt LE901-16S is a “Modular Carbine,” which means it can be adapted to any AR-15 platform upper. This isn’t a new concept, because there are of course a whole bunch of different caliber uppers for ARs. The difference is in all the other ones, they have adapted a standard size AR magazine to boutique calibers and cartridge designs. The Colt 901 is different. It can be adapted from .308/7.62, using standard P-Mags, to .223/5.56, using standard AR mags, and back again, in literally seconds. The design uses one proprietary part, and you have to swap out the recoil system. It is that simple, and it works fantastic.