OSD 274: What happened to every rifle other than the AR-15?

A couple weeks ago, Garand Thumb reviewed the FN FS2000:

The review is especially notable for two things:

• The excellent fish gun song at the beginning.

• It’s a “review” in the same way that you used to review which Ninja Turtle is the best. It’s understood that this is just for fun.

You’re not actually going to buy an FS2000. Nobody is going to buy an FS2000. You’re going to buy an AR-15 like the rest of us.

It wasn’t obvious things would go that way. Rewind ten years, to 2014. And suppose you’re shopping for a semi-auto rifle that fires an intermediate cartridge. Here are the brand new rifle designs that you would have seen become available in the ten years prior, from 2004 to 2014:

• B&T APC

• Beretta ARX100

• CZ Bren

• FightLite SCR

• FN FS2000

• FN SCAR

• IWI Galil ACE

• IWI Tavor

• IWI X95

• Kel-Tec RFB

• Kel-Tec SU-16

• Remington ACR

The pace was rapid, with a brand new rifle design hitting the market every year or two. How have things looked in the last ten years then? Here are the significant rifles that have launched since 2015:

• Desert Tech MDR

• Kel-Tec RDB

• Q Honey Badger

• Sig Sauer MCX

• Springfield Hellion

All but the Hellion had already been announced by 2015, and the Hellion (which is the imported version of the HS Produkt VHS-2, a gun that launched to military customers in 2013) is the only one to hit the market since 2017. Notably, two of the guns — the Honey Badger and the MCX — are an updated take on the AR, not entirely new designs. And even then there’s less variety than there seems; the MCX is Sig’s take on the Honey Badger, so those two designs are cousins, not different visions.

Ok, so that’s new products. Let’s look at sales numbers.

Data on this is laggy, but the NSSF reported that in 2020, US production of AR-15s, not counting the ones that got exported, was 2.47 million units. (They also reported imports of 332,000 ARs and AKs, but let’s exclude that since it’s probably dominated by the AKs and doesn’t swing the overall numbers much anyway.) They didn’t report absolute numbers in 2021 (the latest year for which data is available), but they did report that AR production was up by 32% from 2020.

That implies 3.26 million units in 2021. The NSSF also reported that in that same year, between domestic production and imports (and excluding exports), 4.83 million rifles of all kinds came onto the US market.

So 67.5% of rifles sold in 2021 were AR-15s. Everything else — every AK, the dozens of other semi auto rifles, every 10/22, every bolt gun — had to settle for splitting up the remaining 32.5%. With those numbers it’s obvious why companies mostly stopped thinking up other rifles. The competition is over, the AR won. Where other carbines have found success, it’s in specialized applications where the AR struggles. Over the beach capability, super compact form factors, that sort of thing.

The AR is dominant in media and culture, but by these numbers it turns out that it’s dominant in sales, too. So dominant that no competitor has a meaningful marketshare. That’s a bit sad for those of us who enjoy a proliferation of wacky gun designs, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing for consumers. The AR didn’t get popular by accident. It’s an excellent gun. List what you want in a carbine. You’d want it to be light, modular, reliable, easily repairable, cost-effective, and you’d want it to have a good third-party ecosystem. There are guns that’ll outdo the AR-15 on one or two of those factors, but no gun comes close to its overall score across all those factors.

That will continue for the foreseeable future, because the factors that make it a great gun get stronger the more popular it is. So look to see less investment going into brand new rifle designs, and more going into optimizing and iterating on the AR. Eventually something new will displace it, but the activation energy for that change is going to be high.

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This week’s links

Palmer Luckey briefly discussing his military hardware collection

“I also collect US Air Force nuclear missile bases.”

“Little has changed as NRA heads into first meeting since corruption verdict”

Coverage from The Reload.

“How we uncovered former police guns that were used in crimes”

h/t Discord subscriber @RS3. Story from CBS News, and a good example of using innuendo and tone to make “gun stores selling guns to people who pass the background checks” sound a lot scarier. Also noteworthy that this story was written in partnership with The Trace. They’ve been very effective at laundering gun control talking points into non-editorial mainstream press pieces. See more on how that works in:

OSD 163: Preference laundering

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