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February 1, 2010
Three Accurate Stories About Modern Sporting Rifles
Writers Mark Taylor of the Roanoke Times in Virginia, John Weiss of the Post-Bulletin in Rochester, Minneosta, and Colin Moore of ESPNOutdoors.com each filed stories recently that accurately discuss AR-style modern sporting rifles. NSSF, which has launched a campaign to correct confusion about these rifles, appreciates their professional reporting and invites you to read their pieces.
"[ARs are] one of the fastest growing segments in the market and if you've ever shot one you understand why," [John] Fink [of Remington] said. "They're just a lot of fun to shoot. They're light on recoil and they're surprisingly accurate."
Because the guns share the same basic AR-style platform — the AR stands for ArmaLite, the company that launched the design 50 years ago — there are many add-on parts and modification products available to shooters, many of whom are avid tinkerers.
Patrick Cellette, owner of Cellette's Guns Inc. of New Brighton, Minn. agreed that troops coming back from Vietnam set the stage for push to the modern rifle. "Everything just took off like a rocket from there,"he said. "These are not evil." About 90 percent of his business is AR-related.
The growing popularity of these rifles follows a familiar pattern. The military adopts the latest, greatest fighting weapon, whether a Winchester lever-action or a Springfield '03 bolt-action, and soon those firearms enter the civilian market. That's also what happened with black rifles, whose fame began in the Vietnam War era. Vets, and second- and third-generation vets since then, notched out a place in their hearts for such firearms long after their terms of duty ended.
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Read more about the modern sporting rifle and NSSF's educational campaign to correct the confusion surrounding these AR-style rifles. AR-style rifles look like military rifles, such as the M-16, but function like other semi-automatic civilian sporting firearms, firing only one round with each pull of the trigger.
Categories: Education, Hunting, Media Inaccuracies
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