The AR Platform: Needs More Cowbell!

This post at the Firearm Blog has a post about the AT-14 that got me off on a tangent, so I decided to post about it here instead of stirring up a hornet's nest over there. This is an AR platform that fires the .410 shotgun round. Someone said something about the .410 being as powerful as a .357 magnum. Excuse me? You need a full-size rifle-platform-shotgun thingy firing .410 slugs to equal great-grampappy's wheelgun for stopping power? Duh?

Hold on there.

Why do you want all that fuss? Col. Cooper would ask "What's it for?" (the answer, or course, is "To sell, dummy!") but I guess we don't ask questions like that anymore since he went to his reward.

The real question is, why are we still fascinated with the poodle-shooter and the guns made for it? Dont' get me wrong, with the proper mechanical changes and cleaning, an AR can be almost as reliable as an AK, but then you are still shooting a hot magnum .22 caliber. ;)

Sure you can carry more 5.56 than 7.62 but that's a lot more important if you have a spray and pray switch. Back when the slogan "every Marine a rifleman" meant more than it does now and our rifles only went BANG instead of tink tink tink tink tink tink when you pulled the trigger once, the 7.62 was plenty. Then the Air Force wanted something lighter to carry when they were patrolling watches around stuff that wouldn't be attacked. They got a cool gun and so everybody else had to have one? Boo.

.30-06 was perfect. We rained death from 800 yards on the Germans with .30-06 way back when. Of course, we had a different caliber of men back then, too (quelle double entendre!)

Now our battle rifle is like our national press's ideal of manhood: light in the ass and can't hardly do the man's work it is supposed to do. Doesn't hit hard if it even reaches the goal and won't bruise your poor widdle shoulder. BAH. Let's have a return to a battle rifle with a caliber that will do more than the run-of-the-mill icepick. mid-6mm range is a good start. mid-7mm was better.