M16A2/A4 vs AR-15 Subtitles - Compare and Learn Differences

when talking about the ar-15 and the m16 it's not uncommon to get the two confused after all they both look alike they fire the exact same round and have evolved over the years with similar technologies but upon closer inspection there are some very striking and glaring differences between the two most of these differences have been caused by the missions these rifles were designed to carry out after all the m16 was made at the height of the cold war to give us troops a deadly accurate lightweight and reliable rifle that could beat anything the soviets could manufacture on the other hand the ar-15 was designed with customizability in mind to produce the most accurate and fine-tuned civilian sharpshooting rifle on the market but how are the two related and where exactly do their paths converge to answer that question we must go all the way back to the end of world war ii at the end of world war ii each branch of the military conducted numerous studies on how their service had performed during the war and where they could make technological and tactical improvements one of those studies was conducted by the army in assessing the effectiveness of their primary rifle the m1 grand the findings of the report were shocking on average it was found that almost 80 percent of troops who had experienced combat had never fired their weapon the study ultimately concluded that the reason why the average infantryman rarely if ever actually fired his weapon in combat was his individual belief that his efforts of firing a single shot at a time would not affect the outcome of the battle and felt outclassed by larger weapons or an unseen enemy an interesting finding of the study was that those who carried the browning automatic rifle or bar actually beat the statistic and these men fired more often than their rifle carrying counterparts the conclusion was that these men had greater confidence in their ability to effect change in the course of battle and therefore fired more often they also found that soldiers who were near these men also fired their rifles more therefore army officers concluded that soldiers in the future needed to be equipped with a lightweight yet accurate rifle capable of fully automatic fire the first result of this was the m14 it was a very large rifle weighing in at almost 10 pounds fully loaded with a 20 round magazine of 308 ammunition it was capable of fully automatic fire and was the standard infantry rifle from the 1950s through the first few years of the vietnam war but soldiers in the field had many issues with it the rifle was unyielding and very heavy the heavy caliber also limited the amount of ammunition that could be carried it was also uncontrollable in full automatic the army needed something to replace it and began looking at other options even before the vietnam war started one of the earliest contenders to do so was an experimental rifle produced by the armalite company called the ar-10 the ar-10 was a revolutionary rifle and was the brainchild of eugene stoner stoner sought to develop a lightweight accurate rifle that was reliable in all conditions and could outperform all current rifles on the battlefield to do so he developed several unique features that would later become ubiquitous with the m16 such as its patented gas blowback system polymer design and ergonomic build to market to the military he first chambered in the standard 762 by 51 millimeter nato round he did so because the military wanted to have their rifles and machine guns which was the m60 machine gun at the time chambered in the same round to reduce logistics issues initial testing with the ar-10 was quite impressive to the military but at the time of these tests in the late 1950s the government had already signed a huge contract for hundreds of thousands of m14 rifles undeterred stoner went back to the drawing board to come up with a new design to ensure that his rifle would be the one adopted by the military that new design was the ar-15 the ar-15 was even better than his previous model and incorporated several major improvements to further decrease the weight stoner made the rifles from lighter polymers and plastics in addition to using mostly aluminum parts wherever possible this reduced the weight by almost a third compared to the m14 another major improvement was changing the caliber for the past several decades the military had been experimenting with a smaller caliber bullet that could still deliver the power of full-size rounds like the 308 and thirty out six commonly used in machine guns the ar-15 model was the first to ditch the desire for a full-sized cartridge in favor of a more compact and lighter yet powerful round called the 223 remington the benefits of using a smaller round took into consideration the years of study of wound ballistics where heavier higher velocity rounds simply passed through targets but smaller medium-sized rounds tumbled and caused wound cavitation the expansion of pressure inside a target which caused more damage medium-sized rounds like the 223 also enabled troops to carry more ammunition than before and created less recoil meaning more accurate shots and more controllable fully automatic fire stoner was eager to get his creation in front of the military and went to some unordinary measures to do so at a fourth of july celebration in 1960 he approached a high-ranking general in the air force and gave him an impromptu test demonstration stoner set up a range of watermelon targets at 50 100 and 150 yards and asked the general to shoot them the general was so impressed by the rifle that he requested 100 000 on the spot this ambitious order was later revised to 8 500 a year later but stoner had just won a huge step forward in marketing his rifle to the military rigorous testing by the us air force and army followed stoner's personal demonstrations for top military brass all tests proved highly satisfactory and listed the rifle as highly reliable and accurate the air force was the first service to widely adopt the rifle in the early 1960s and once vietnam started to heat up the army was soon to follow within a few years it was the main battle rifle of the us military in vietnam through today atelies gradual replacement by the m4 carbine fundamentally the m16 and the ar-15 are built and function the same the main components of both rifles are a lower and upper receiver a barrel front and rear sights a magazine well a charging handle a bolt assembly a butt stock a trigger assembly and a compensator the upper receiver carries the barrel and bolt assembly while the lower receiver houses the trigger firing mechanism and magazine well these are connected to the rifle by stoner's iconic pushpins first adopted in the 60s how the rifle works is when a magazine is inserted into the magazine well the first round is put into the path of the bolt when the charging handle is cocked back the bolt carrier assembly is now under pressure and pushes the first round into the chamber when it's let go as the round is seated inside the chamber the bolt assembly rotates and locks the bolt into place doing so prevents the unintended loss of gas pressures when the bullets fired the round itself is fired when the trigger which is attached to lugs that prevent the hammer from going forward is pulled the hammer then strikes the firing pin which in turn hits the primer on the round the primer causes a small explosion that ignites the powder inside the cartridge sending the bullet down the barrel after the round is fired a small amount of gas enters what's called the gas tube at the end of the barrel the hot pressurized gases are then forced into the bolt assembly when the pressure is great enough which happens in fractions of a second the whole bolt assembly is forced rearward and a reverse process ensues as the bolt carrier travels backward it unlocks and rotates what's called the extractor the extractor is the portion of the bolt carrier that pushes the spent casing out of the chamber the excess gases that were once pushing on the bolt carrier now push on the spent casing as well and force it out of the extraction port while the bolt carrier travels backward it also the hammer again basic physics tells us that every action has an equal and opposite reaction so when the gases stop pushing the bolt assembly slides forward doing so pushes another round into the chamber and the rifle is ready to fire once again since the design of the original m16 there have been several variations to come out that have improved on the initial model whether for ironing out design flaws or adapting to the needs of the us military the very first m16 the one most similar to the ar-15 it was derived from was the m16a1 this model is the classic one that people recognize from all the shows and films about the vietnam war the next version to arise in the 1980s was the m16a2 this model came about when the military wanted to shift away from the spray and prey mentality of fully automatic fire and instead focus on marksmanship hence the major change with the m16a2 was making it only semi-automatic or burst fire capable the m16a3 came out during the 1990s and briefly went back to the fully automatic firing mode of its predecessor however as modern battlefields changed once more from the cold war style confrontations of masked armies in small areas to fighting smaller scale engagements over large distances the services adopted their final change to the m16a4 the m16a4 reverted back to the m16a2 design of being capable of only semi-automatic and three-round burst fire capability another major change was the addition of a rail system on both barrel and upper receiver by adding this rail system the new design enabled advanced optical sights lasers and flashlights to be added or exchanged with ease thereby increasing the capability of the average rifleman greater than ever before as far as raw data the ar15 and m16a4 are close contenders the m16a4 and ar15 both weigh in at about seven pounds fully loaded the m16a4 has an average effective range of 550 meters while the ar-15 lags behind with most firearm experts agreeing that the effective range for civilian shooters are between 400 and 600 meters both rifles are also manufactured standard with the 223 remington round while the ar-15 and m16a4 are both based on the same core design there are a variety of features both functional and cosmetic that would make one better than the other one of the main differences in the ar-15s and m16s is the closed third hole in the seer the seer is the portion of the rifle that determines what mode of fire it can shoot in most ar-15s have this third hole on the lower receiver that was left over from the m16a1 design which enabled fully automatic fire civilians could in theory drill a hole through it and make a few other modifications to make it fire full auto but doing so is a felony and highly illegal the m16a4 by default has more firing options than civilian-owned ar-15s another critical design difference between the two is what's called the forward assist the forward assist is a button attached to a handle on the right side of the m16a4 that enables the shooter to manually push the bolt all the way forward to see the round fully in the chamber the feature was added by stoner during the vietnam war when reports from the field came back that the rifles would jam incessantly while the root of the problem uncovered in a subsequent congressional investigation found that the cause of the jamming was the military using an improper propellant in their ammunition that stoner had warned them not to do the forward assist has nonetheless remained an integral feature of all further m16 models that's because soldiers operate in some of the harshest environments in the world and while they may clean their rifles frequently dirt and debris always quickly find a home inside rifles which makes the addition of a forward assist crucial to ensuring reliability ar-15s on the other hand do not come standard with a forward assist while some certainly do there are no standard models of ar-15s like there are m16a4s for the military civilian and police shooters face a more arduous task of clearing jams and malfunctions than their military counterparts the ar-15 does have the advantage of customizability especially with mixing and matching of uppers and lowers one of the benefits of this is allowing shooters to modify the caliber of their rifle from the standard 223 up to a 50 caliber bmg or even down to pistol cartridges like the 22 or 9 millimeter while having the ability to change out calibers using different receivers does provide a lot of versatility it's not something that can be done in a fire fight and is somewhat cost prohibitive both for the receiver and the often rare ammunition that shot through them ar-15s also have the advantage of a wide range of magazines that can be used with a rifle including a 100 round drum magazine since the m16a4 is only issued with the standard 30 round magazines the military has used for years m16s do beat out the ar-15 in another feature and that's the addition of the chrome-lined barrel during the vietnam war it was discovered that by plating the inside of the barrel with chrome the life expectancy of the barrel could be increased and the amount of corrosion decreased while the effect of chrome-lined barrels on accuracy is still a hotly debated topic the fact that they increase reliability is a proven concept ar-15s have the option of chrome-lined barrels but this feature is an additional cost for the buyer and does not come standard in all ar-15s the last few differences between the two are merely cosmetic and demonstrate the military utility of the m16a4 over the ar-15 the m16a4 comes standard with a carrying handle while most ar15s do not in favor of extra space for rails to put scopes sights and other gadgets ar15s usually do not come with a bayonet lug either and some do not have sling studs to mount on a sling which would make carrying long distances cumbersome and tiring in order to determine which one is better it would really depend on what the rifles were needed for if the user needed a rifle to arm a large group of people for combat the m16a4 would definitely be the choice due to its increased reliability and standard configuration that makes manufacturing training and employing large quantities of rifles both efficient and at a lower cost if the user wanted the ability to customize to get the most out of the ar m16 platform the ar-15 would undoubtedly be the winner due to the wide range of calibers gadgets barrels and magazines that can be interchanged to produce the most effective rifle possible however the capacity to equip large armies with this kind of setup is not likely due to the small limited market of these calibers and high cost as for saying which one is better it's best to say that the m16a4 would outclass most ar-15s in a battlefield environment but that the m16a4 could be outclassed in the civilian world say in a marksmanship competition due to the amount of customization that can be done to it