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 7.62x54mm 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?