No, they survive because people buy an inferior product and even after they discover it’s inferior they try and fix it themselves, rather than make the company address it. I know of an LE agency right now that’s having issues with their weapons and it’s becoming a major problem.
Colt going bankrupt has nothing to do with their quality or their sales. It’s because of their organization, their location and liabilities.
The cost difference between a Colt and BM in normal times was usually not much more than 150.00. Anyone can afford to save 150.00 more. In fact anyone could save 300.00 more, but people don’t want to because we live in the Instant Gratification society of microwave results.
I guess I just got lucky, then. Mine was made on a Wednesday morning, perhaps. I can’t tell if the castle nut is staked, because it has the correct A2 stock on it, but the gas key bolts appear to be properly staked; the bolt metal is pushed into the heads of the bolts. The barrel is marked NATO 1/9 MP, but there are no markings on the bolt.
I find it hard to believe that “an agency” is having problems with their guns. Why? Because SURELY they have many highly educated Experts telling them what to order etc…People who KNOW that certain guns are junk etc…who would tell them so, who would provide persuasive examples of how Junky those guns really were- assuming they were actually doing their jobs etc…Again, as YOU SAY, the difference, and I have to believe at LEO pricing it’s even LESS of a difference, in cost is minimal.
As far as sending a gun back for issues, there are certainly some issues that I would send a rifle back for. Staking a castle nut or a carrier key isn’t one of those things. The postage in sending it back and risk of loss in shipping- happens more than people like to admit, far outweigh the two minutes it takes to “fix” it.
With Colt, I can’t really agree with all that. First, there is no way that their civilian sales are anywhere near what Bushmasters numbers are- the last time I looked, Bushmaster outsold Colt 2/1. Market share in business…“is a thing” that has meaning for a companies survival and profitability. You can’t just pretend it doesn’t matter. Second, their “liabilities” should have been wiped out in bankruptcy- that’s the purpose of a bankruptcy if done properly. And their location? Move. Firearms companies - those that want to stay in business- Magpul (Texas), PTR (South Carolina), AAC (Alabama), Beretta (Tn), Winchester (ammo plant, Oxford MS) Armalite (Arizona)…See a pattern? Are getting the hell out of communist shitholes that want to run them out of business or where labor costs are stupidly high…in fact ALL MANUFACTURERS of products have known that if they wanted to survive in the U.S., they need to move south at least since the 1980s’- this is nothing new. If they are too stupid to figure that out, then I don’t care how good of a product they make, they deserve to fail.
I am far from an AR expert but the Rifle receiver extension doesn’t use a castle nut. I guess 90% of the AR buyers will never realize or need the quality of a high quality part AR.
I’ve owned one Bushy. It was horribly overgassed, had fairly frequent stoppages, and the gas key became loose a couple hundred rounds in. This was around 2001. I sold it.
You’re exactly right. 90% of buyers don’t shoot enough for it to matter. They don’t. Period. They want “An AR15 because they might ban them or I need one to shoot pigs with”. Honest to God that’s why most people have them.
They aren’t doing high round count classes etc…The statistics that I have seen show that nationwide about 10,000 serious students “drive” the training market, that’s it. We are not a nation of hard ass Spartans, sorry, but that’s how it is. And God Bless those folks- they make it possible for these companies to EXIST- because again- Market Making/Market share is reality. Average consumers of AR15’s buy more Magpul magazines than the US military and Civilian Spartans COMBINED by orders of magnitude. Without that buying power the AR Platform would be stuck in about 2004- and a lot has changed since then.
But I do understand how business works. Anyone who has taken Business 101 knows I’m right. I understand bankruptcy. I understand that ever since the Rust Belt concept was coined that businesses have fled the Northeast if they wanted to survive.
I understand that the AVERAGE AR15 consumer isn’t you or me and denying it doesnt make it less true.
I had a bushmaster that I bought before I knew anything about AR’s back in 2015. Well fast forward to 2018 I got educated on the AR-15 platform learning so much though those few years. Eventually I finally got around to selling the upper on an online sale, striped the lower down to just the bare receiver and installed a BCM lpk including their Mil-spec buffer tube that is torqued at 40 foot pounds and staked twice along with a bcm buffer spring and H buffer. I then threw a complete Colt 6920 upper on it now it’s a completely different rifle.
I have had two complete Bushmasters from around 2000-2001 and I still have one of the lowers that I use with my 22LR upper. I never had any trouble to speak of but I wasn’t a high round shooter with either rifle.
Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that, even though it should. Some agencies budgeting and policies basically reward the cheaper contract even though you and I know spending more once would be the smarter option. So if the colt is 1$ more than the bushmaster, guess what they are buying…bushmaster. The caveat is that other agencies with big money cities can pretty much say this is what we want and they get it. My agency swat team has bushmaster sbr’s (although modified enough to basically only still retain the factory lower) but we aren’t a large $ agency. Two of our neighboring agencies, one has KAC sbr’s and the other has/had hk416’s. TLDR its not that simple.
I know of an agency that has the surplus a1 rifles on loan from the government, that have been converted to carbines. Some by the officers themselves and some by an outside source. They are quite the hodgepodge of parts. Some are extremely high quality and others are built using airsoft grade junk.
My duty rifle is a HK416 FS.Personally I have a Bushmaster XM-15 MOE M4-Type Carbine, and both have equal accuracy at 100m with SS109 (62gr) cartridges.
Another factor in Bushmaster’s “survival” is their widespread name recognition based on their (unfortunate) association with mass shootings and the way they’ve been covered in the media. I would bet that a lot of Americans couldn’t identify Colt as a major manufacturer of military weapons, but they would recognize Bushmaster as a producer of “assault weapons.” My brother-in-law, who is also in the military, has an M&P Sport but rarely shoots it. A couple years ago, after I took him out to shoot my midlength BCM, said, “what I really want to get is a Bushmaster.” It was simply the first name that he associated with AR15s.
My Bushmaster XM15-E2S was the first AR I bought, purchased at the end of 2004 right after the AWB sunset. Us older guys will remember that back then, if you couldn’t find a Colt, or didn’t want to want to pay $1,000+ for one, nearly everyone would tell you to buy a Bushmaster as the next best thing. The big question back then was whether or not a rifle had a chrome-lined barrel, which seems to be almost a given nowadays. After Bushmaster, Olympic, DPMS, Rock River, and the few other manufacturers of the early 2000s were considered to be inferior. I was not very satisfied with my Bushmaster; between the commercial receiver extension (which sounded like it had sand inside it when I pulled the charging handle back), semi auto bolt carrier, mushy selector, and plastic GI-style trigger guard, it just felt “cheap” compared to the military rifles I was used to. I never had any functional issues with it, but I didn’t really put it through its paces (I was deployed too often to take any classes after buying it). I just didn’t have a lot of confidence in it and wasn’t excited about getting out to shoot it very often. I didn’t know much about the technical specs of ARs, but that rifle killed my interest in civilian ARs for almost a decade until I bought my first BCM (after reading this forum for most of a deployment).
I recently upgraded my Bushmaster with a BCM RE assembly, FCG, and furniture, a Colt selector, and a PSA premium BCG, and it functions great and feels more “solid,” for lack of a more thorough technical assessment. It’s interesting to read the comments about overgassing here, since my rifle seems to have a stronger recoil impulse than the military M4s I’m used to. I’m going to experiment with an H2 buffer to see if I can tame the recoil a little. This rifle will end up being a training / loaner rifle that I’ll probably use to experiment with new components once in a while.
