You must go to GAT guns. Trust me. You never saw anything like it. It is like 3 floors of Bass Pro only guns! AR15 is all plastic. I do not trust it. they made it because people cannot get an AK anymore. Only reason. I am too sick to try the AK now anyways. Or I would just go do it Tomorrow. Too bad I never used it.
I think I got the Eagle in the mid 90's or something. My wife gave it to me for my birthday. I am pretty sure she paid about $750 then. Now they are more than twice that. It is a stupid gun. Unless your wrist is so strong the recoil you are sure to miss your target. I have a series 1 Glock too. I got these things when they came out, not now. Now they are a lot of money.
Marbles, hundreds? Did you look? Try hundreds of thousands! Look at the "auction". That is the big money ones. I would not pay that. Don't have it. My most expensive one is $600. Flashlights is a big thing too. I have some Surefire and 1 custom. I got in on the ground floor of the build so that was not a lot either. I am just not loaded but i like stuff
That does sound really cool. I'll have to take a trip there, if only just to drool (I have been trying to reign in my spending lately, and keyboards are already bad enough).
The AR-15 actually predates the adoption of the M16, which was just a military adaptation from the AR-15. The AR-15 has been around since at least the late 1950s, I believe, and is basically functionally identical to its predecessor, the AR-10, which is basically the same rifle in 7.62 NATO. Their receivers are actually made entirely of CNCed aluminum. Most of the internals, especially the important parts of the action, are made of steel. The barrels are also steel. The original furniture was polymer, yes, but that has more to do with the theme of weight savings than anything of structural importance. Most modern AR-15s now have aluminum, or even carbon fiber, free-float handguards to improve repeatable precision, and there are wood furniture sets available, if you were so inclined to buy them.
In short, the parts that must be very durable are, the parts that could be a little lighter instead are. Between that and the extremely ergonomic locations of the controls, the ease of field stripping, and the high velocity, small diameter, low recoiling, flat shooting cartridge, the AR-15 is very much a high speed, low drag sort of tool (not to sound too tacticool, lol).
Without writing a book about it, the AK-47 meets its designed operating parameters well, and probably exceeds them in many categories. The AR-15 certainly does as well. The AR, however, is more easily customizable, much lighter, more ergonomic, more repeatably precise at a given range, effective at much longer ranges (compared against the original 7.62x39 chambering), can be toted with more ammunition at the same weight, and is actually much less susceptible to the ingress of debris of all sorts than the AK (which itself often leads to malfunctions in any platform), and has quicker (aimed) repeated follow-up shots.
If I needed to survive the apocalypse without ever being able to service or, especially not be able to lubricate/clean it for whatever reason, ever again, and/or needed to be able to use it in literally every extreme environment on earth, maybe I would want an AK. Otherwise, I'm AR-15 all of the way, every day.
I imagine you could still take out the AK and have some fun, the 7.62x39 cartridge is pretty girthy, with some mass, but it is still an intermediate cartridge. It certainly isn't nearly as bad as a large hunting cartridge like .30-06 in terms of recoil.
That's a fantastic birthday gift. .50 AE is no joke, but the old ones were entirely steel I believe, and not light. I imagine that helps a lot with the recoil. It can't be as bad as .500 S&W, etc, or even lighter snubby revolvers in your average magnum cartridge. With how quickly a projectile leaves the barrel, ideally, its trajectory is already set before much muzzle flip occurs. It should never be appreciable, that's for sure. The problem is that people flinch when anticipating the coming recoil of large/hot cartridges, and that causes precision problems. Glocks are still in the mid-range, although they're certainly not worth the $500 they cost, no matter how well they're engineered and manufactured. I hear Gaston Glock was going to price it at a fraction of the final retail cost but was swayed to jack up the price by the bean counters. I'm a little old school in that I like to have either a manual thumb safety (ideally) or a double action trigger. With the right practice/training, there's no detriment, and a major benefit in added safety. To each their own, especially since you seem to not worry so much about practical considerations, just collection.
Yeah, I just looked at the random offerings on their landing page. I'll look again later. I get most of my lights as surplus. It is much cheaper that way. I snatched up a lot of TLR-1s, so I'm pretty well set in that regard.
If you haven't noticed, I know a lot more about firearms than I do about keyboards.