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Luca Stricagnoli Covers Eminem on Solo Acoustic Guitar and It Is Good: "Lose Yourself"

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Shiplord Kirel: From behind wingnut lines9/02/2019 7:01:14 am PDT

The AR in AR-15 really does stand for ARmalite Rifle, just as it does in the designation of my Henry “US Survival” AR-7. The latter is a .22 LR breakdown rifle that was designed for aircrews to carry with their emergency gear. It was also an Armalite product and in fact was also designed by Eugene Stoner but it’s not an assault weapon by any stretch of the imagination.
The fact remains though that Stoner and Armalite never intended the AR-15 to be anything but a military weapon, based on the assault rifle principles established earlier by the Stg-44 and the AK-47. Another widely prevalent myth is that “AR-15” refers to the semi-auto civilian version while select-fire military versions are M-16s. In fact AR-15 is a commercial designation, originally a trademark, while M-16 is a military designation applied to the AR-15 when it was standardized for military issue in 1965. Before that, the US and several other countries had purchased thousands of select fire AR-15s on commercial contracts. IIRC, it was first taken into action by the British SAS in Borneo in 1962. My father had a select-fire AR-15 while he was in Vietnam in 1964. Robin Moore’s novel The Green Berets, written in 1964 and set in the spring of that year, mentions the AR-15 pretty extensively, describing its effects in graphic, and wholly accurate, terms. Finally, the rifle I used in basic training in 1970 was stamped “AR-15.” It was otherwise identical to the M-16s the rest of the company had. The armorer explained that it was just one of the ones purchased before the adoption of the M-16 designation and that he had seen quite a few of them over the years.

To summarize, “AR-15” does not stand for “assault rifle” but it damn well is an assault rifle by any relevant definition and by the intent of the designer.