ThunderKiss1965
Platinum Member
The M-16 I fired had a selector switch for semi to burst. The ones used by my relatives during the Vietnam war switched between semi and full auto. The AR-15 I can buy at gun stores across the country have no such switch and only fire semi the same as a .270 semiautomatic hunting rifles. The only similarities between the military M-16 and the civilian AR-15 is the recoil system and cosmetics.Did you have an M-16?
ArmaLite first developed the AR-15 in the late 1950s as a military rifle, but had limited success in selling it. In 1959 the company sold the design to Colt.
In 1963, the U.S. military selected Colt to manufacture the automatic rifle that soon became standard issue for U.S. troops in the Vietnam War. It was known as the M-16.
Armed with that success, Colt ramped up production of a semiautomatic version of the M-16 that it sold to law enforcement and the public, marketed as the AR-15.
When Colt's patents for the AR-15 expired in the 1970s, other manufacturers began making similar models.
Those gun makers gave the weapons their own names, yet the popularity of the AR-15 turned it into a generic term for all types of AR-15-style rifles.
A Brief History Of The AR-15
The semi-automatic rifle has been in wide circulation for more than a half-century. In recent years, gunmen have used AR-15-style weapons to carry out many of the country's worst mass shootings.www.npr.org
Seriously NPR ? The fucking loony press has proven time and time again to be wrong or out right lie about firearms.