Which Battle Rifle
No sooner did I get my new AR-15 than I started looking for another one.
Keeping with the spirit of buying scary guns with evil pistol grips and high-cap mags, I’m looking at a battle rifle next. ‘Battle rifle’ is a generic term (like ‘assault rifle’, but not so abused) meaning a big-more semiauto rifle designed for or suited to military use. An AR-15 is not a battle rifle, as it doesn’t pass the caliber test. Nor is an AK-47 or AK-74.
Major battle rifles I considered:
- Springfield M1A – .308, uber-reliable, uber-accurate, uber-expensive
- FN FAL – The ‘right arm of the free world’
- PTR91 (an H&K 91 clone) – A reasonably reliable, accurate rifle, but like the AR-15 it has a ’shit where I eat’ gas system that (I’ve heard) makes it a drag to clean
- Saiga 308 – The Saiga 308’s that are coming into the country via Russian American Arms are really sporting rifles, but Tromix does a cool conversion job, putting in the necessary US parts for Section 922 compliance (after all, we can’t have criminals running around with Russian trigger parts; they might kill someone), and generally tricking it out for more social situations.
For some reason, all the .308 battle rifles seem to be in high demand now; perhaps amid the post-election jitters about another AWB.
At any rate, I’m not willing to compromise on reliability for any of these, so I excluded kits (since I wouldn’t be able to put them together adequately), so-called frankenguns built out of mismatched scrounged parts, and low-grade import jobs from Century Arms and the like.
The M1A is insanely expensive; the Scout Squad in black poly furniture is in excess of $1600, with 20-rd mags going for $60/ea. The high-end SG58 FAL clones from DSR are around $1800, plus they have a 12-week lead time. A decent PTR-91 goes for 1200-1300 NIB, though like the FAL spare mags are plentiful and cheap.
This leaves the Saiga 308, which is based on the Kalashnikov design, but adapted to 7.62×54mm NATO cartridges. With a Tromix conversion I’m looking at $800-$1000, plus $50/ea for the newly-released 20 rd mags. The real problem w/ a Saiga is the utter lack of after-market parts. Sure, it has some parts in common w/ an AK-47, but not all of them, and the high-cap mags are made by FBMG as an after-market part, costing $45/mag.
So, the cheapest battle rifle looks to be a Saiga 308, but after buying 10 mags and a Tromix conversion, I’m in $1500 territory; it’s not much further from there to a top-of-the-line DSR FAL for $1800.
So which one to get? Why is it so complicated?