what do you think about militaries using killer robots?

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Stoner was a hobby gunsmith, he was recruited to Armalite because the company president noticed him shooting a homemade rifle at a range and started chatting with him and realized he was a gun design prodigy.

Which would have to had happened before he designed the AR-10 and AR-15 - so even if he was recruited for being a hobbyist who made nifty guns, the AR series weapons could not be among them, cos he'd not have made them yet, having made them while at ArmaLite. So the "hunting rifle" story still doesn't add up.

Furthermore, this "hobby gunsmith" was the chief engineer for ArmaLite, and designed a sizeable number of their guns, usually for military contract bids. Not to mention that afterwards, he went on to co-found ARES Inc, where he made the ARES Light Machine gun, before joining Knights Armament, where he refined the AR-10 into the SR-25 series Stoner Rifles, which were also designed for the military, and adopted as the M110. Cos nothing says "humble hunting rifle" like "United States Navy Mark 11 Mod 0 Sniper Weapon System".

While at ArmaLite, as the chief engineer, he developed the AR-5, which is the rifle that caught the eye of the USAF. It was explicitly designed to compete for the USAF compact survival rifle contract.

Not to mention that Eugene Stoner served and saw combat as a U.S. Marine, who worked primarily in ordinance, by intention. He was a combat-trained military soldier, long before he joined ArmaLite, with an expressed interest in munitions. But yes, tell me again how he's just a quaint little "hobbyist" who made a nifty rifle and got lucky

On a side note, a sizeable number of modern suppressors are made of STEEL. Some smaller one are made of ALUMINIUM. Really fancy ones might use omg TITANIUM! These are hardly "exotic alloys", unless you're easily impressed. They can run anywhere from $300 to $1500, on average, not including the $200 tax stamp for an NFA transfer, and they usually take about 6 months for the transfer to go through.

And a friendly reminder, or for those who didn't know. Making a non-registered suppressor (NFA violation) is a federal crime with a 10 year prison sentence. Openly telling people how to make them might earn some edgy internet cool points, but I can't help but feel that the smart thing to do is to keep knowledge like that to one's self, or at least in a private conversation. Are there any other crimes you'd like to teach us how to commit?

All this difficulty and expense associated with owning an NFA firearm is largely why people don't pull stupid crap with them. They're difficult and expensive and take quite a bit of time to jump through all the hoops. There's also the fact they they're registered and documented. If there's police reports of someone going around with a suppressed 9mm, and you own a 9mm suppressor, guess who's door they're going to knock on first, cos probable cause.

No, they can't search your home whenever they want if you own an NFA weapon - but they can inspect your place of business if you have a FFL or other license to sell or manufacture, such as a Class II (can make non-NFA firearms) or Class III (can make NFA items such as suppressors, automatic weapons, SBR's and other AOW's)

Second friendly reminder. As mentioned, some calibers for the AR are optimized for shorter barrels. These uppers are meant to be on AR lowers registered as pistols. A rifle with a barrel shorter than 16" is considered a Short Barreled Rifle (SBR) and is an NFA restricted item at that point. So if you're building your own AR, make sure you keep pistol uppers and lowers, and rifle uppers and lowers, together. Mixing them in either direction is an NFA violation.

So Dox, you've got a gunsmithing degree, eh? Cool. What guns have you smithed, and in what ways have you done so?

Robots with guns still seems like a bad idea.

I believe the design originated with his pre-employment tinkering, regardless of what form the perfected version ended up as at Armalite. I could be wrong here, I don't have a reference on hand, but I believe the DI design did come from his desire for a lighter weight rifle for his wife to carry.



Sigh. I have enough NFA stamps to fill a small notebook, it's truly an addiction, once you start shooting quietly you'll never want to fire something loud again. Steel and aluminum are fine for pistol and rimfire cans, but for rifles you really need something tougher if it's for anything but light duty, at least for the blast baffle, as the hot gasses can very quickly erode less durable materials; my hard use rifle can uses a 100% Stellite baffle stack, and even my medium use 5.56 can has an inconel blast baffle as that round is particularly abrasive on baffles, while I also have a light duty titanium model in NFA jail as we speak. You also see some fancy maraging steels or really oddball stuff in the newer DMLS made cans that are coming out, but that's relatively new on the market and people are still figuring out what kind of weird geometry is possible and efficient with the new manufacturing technique. Then there's the bimetals that some companies use, but I don't think that really counts as an alloy.

Shortest transfer I've ever had was 6 months, they're running closer to a year at the moment, though supposedly we're about to get electronic form 4s that should cut the wait down, though last time they tried that the ATF server crashed almost instantly, pretty true to form for that agency. I hope it works this time though, I'm pretty jazzed about the titanium can I have in process, they're holding the paperwork for me to submit it electronically, so I can be a guinea pig for the new system, maybe I'll have it by March, lol.



Clutching those pearls a little tightly, aren't we? That's literally something you can see in an action movie, or, you know, by asking this communications medium we're conversing over, there are plenty of how to videos if anyone is actually curious. At the end of the day, it's just a gun muffler after all, the same guy invented the car muffler, and they use the exact same principles, not exactly a dark art here.



Not exactly, NFA documents are considered tax documents and aren't cross indexed with local law enforcement, plus the system is archaic and runs on actual paper, it's surprisingly laborious and difficult for cops to check this stuff unless they have the item in hand and have the ATF on the phone, and even then it's not a sure thing. They actually couldn't pull up who owns what in an area just on suspicion, especially since they're so easy to make, plus I suspect they're more common than you think, I'm far from the only guy at my range with cans, and the Seattle area isn't exactly a mecca of gun ownership.



That can get tricky with constructive possession rules, aside from not putting the pistol upper on the rifle lower without a stamp, what you need is to have at least one legal configuration possible from what parts you own, i.e. if you have a short barreled upper, you need to have at least one pistol or SBR lower so you have a possible legal configuration, which confuses some people in the era of pistol braces. Years ago the ATF tried to bust a guy who owned a T/C pistol and rifle because the parts could be assembled into an SBR, but the ruling was that since they could be assembled into two legal firearms he couldn't be charged, shows you what kind of BS the ATF will try to pull on you.



Eh, not much that was memorable, gunsmithing is really mostly repair and maintenance, with a little cosmetic work and customization on occasion, more like plumbing or car repair than building cool custom stuff like people usually think. I got my degree in 2005, before we hit peak AR, so most of what I learned on was old school stuff, bolt action deer rifles, pump shotguns, 1911s, lot of fixing neglected guns, the occasional rebluing or rebarrel job, restoring someone's childhood .22, stuff like that. I did briefly work for a guy that did machinegun rentals, that was pretty fun, got to work on M60s, M1919s, various flavors of MAC 10/11, a USAS-12 that was the bane of my existence, etc. I've got a pretty neat .22-250 that I built from scratch as a school project still in my safe, I'm resisting the urge to thread it as it would completely ruin the look and I want to keep it like it was when I built it, but I was also dead serious about not wanting to shoot loud guns anymore; maybe I'll form 1 an old timey looking can to match the look one day, that might be fun.

Accusing me of clutching at pearls for simply letting people know that something you causally suggested is in fact a felony, while desperately clinging to notion of the "hunting rifle" narrative is kinda funny. There is a difference between seeing Steven Segal do it in a movie, and hearing a real human being actively suggest it in the real world - especially on a site like this, where some people already have odd ideas, or are more easily suggestable. And a car muffler isn't a federal offense, but a gun muffler is, so there is still that. I'm hardly shocked and appalled. I just think it's somewhere between stupid and irresponsible, and wanted to inform people in case they decided to try it out for themselves. "It's a felony" seems like a relevant detail, no matter how easy it is to do, or readily accessible the information.

My point was less "OMG giving away arcane deadly secrets!" and more "yeah, if you're gonna tell people how to do that, maybe also warn them that it's illegal, so they don't run out and try it thinking it isn't".

Sigh. The only thing a horde of NFA transfers requires (other than the obvious legal prerequisites, like not being a felon) is money. That doesn't make you special.

But I am amazed. You wrote an entire essay on the matter. I'm proud. You seem to know what you know quite well.

It is kinda interesting that you wrote an entire huge paragraph that started with "not much that was memorable", and then go on to remember quite a lot. Or was that meant as a humble-brag kinda thing? Most of what you've described is "basic gun maintenance", which I am glad that you know, too many people don't. But it's still just "basic care". Taking a formal class on it is never a bad idea though. Your mystery school-project gun is the only gun you've built? Hm.

Why was your work for that individual so brief?

Gun laws are indeed tricky, which is all the more reason I would not be so cavalier with the suggestions I make in public, lest some poor soul unwittingly become a court case, or a statistic. I'm glad you take guns seriously enough to know about them, but there's still that mildly flippant / cocky attitude - you know the laws so well, then seem to have such disregard for them. Which is what I've found oft leads to careless accidents, or lessons learned the hard way.

The "wife's dainty hunting rifle" crap still doesn't make sense, cos the AR-15 is just a smaller version of the AR-10, and the AR-10 is a big heavy hard-hitting .308 cal. Very much not "a dainty easier to shoot rifle for muh wife". Stoner just took the AR-10 platform and scaled it down for the .223 round, at the military's request. Part of the reason for it's ever-so-popular modularity and customizability is cos the military likes to be able to change their loadout as easily as possible.

I am an advocate of suppressors, and hardly consider them rare. As you've demonstrated, they're not hard to get. Some super high end suppressors use fancy schmancy materials, but there's still plenty of high end cans rated for full auto and large calibers and everything, made of titanium and steel. The mere presence of exotic materials does not equate to an abundance of exotic materials. Alu steel and Ti are still largely the norm.

Your comment about gunsmithing being fairly mundane, like auto repair, gave me a really good laugh. If all you are is an entry level-parts changer, then yes, it is fairly mundane. The way you're downplaying the custom side of things makes it feel like you know it's there, you just don't want to admit that you don't play there.

The hairsplitting part where you correct me about how cross referencing the paper files is difficult, but not impossible, is slightly spoiled by the part where you brag about how you get to be the guinea pig for the all new ELECTRONIC database.

Still think robots with guns is a bad idea.