Picked up a new AR today. I’d been wanting a slightly ‘upper tier’ AR for a while now. I’ve a stack of Palmettos, Stags, Bushmasters, Rugers, etc. but I kinda wanted something with a little more high-end quality. You can spend a lot in the AR world for a Noveske or an LMT or some other top-tier brand and I wouldn’t mind having one. But…I’m not quite there yet. I did want to get something, though, a bit better than what I have. One of my vendors was having a sale and I decided that the folks at FN have been stamping out guns for the better part of over 100 years…let’s get one of their AR’s.

Nothing terribly fancy. Its an FN TAC3 which is what the pattern for most AR carbines seems to be these days – M-lok handguard, telestock, no front sight tower, lotsa pic rail. I’m throwing an Eotech on there, some BUIS, swapping out the muzzle device for a quick mount for a suppressor, adding a light, and calling it a day.

I’ve been shooting AR’s since…mmm…the late 80’s. I think I’ve owned every brand that was extant back then and have seen some weird ones come and go. Back in the day, you didn’t have M4geries…they were called CAR-15’s. If you had an AR you most likely had a full size 20″ rifle. Back then it was Colt, Bushmaster, Olympic, and DPMS. There might have been a few outliers but those were the main brands.

Pic rail wasn’t a thing yet, and attaching a flashlight to your gun never really occurred to us. Flattops were definitely not a thing….AR’s all had carry handles. If you were tacticool you might have the Colt carry-handle scope or an Armson OEG on there. If it was a CAR-15, odds are good you had about 4″ of flash suppressor hanging off the front of your gun to make it legal length,

Mags were aluminum from Okay, Adventureline, Colt, Sierra, and a handful of other makers. If you wanted a drum there was a massive plastic 90-round monstrosity you could buy. If you wanted to really go off the deep end, the guys at LL Baston made mounts to mount an underbarrel shotgun like it was an M203. … an idea that is yet to die. I have never seen one in real life.

As time went on, the ‘rankings’ of manufacturers waxed and waned. The “ABC’s” (Armalite, Bushmaster, Colt) were the highly regarded top-tier guns (mind you this was damn near 40 years ago), and things like Olympic and DPMS were the ‘budget’ guns…much like Anderson/Palmetto today.

Also, way back then (late 80’s), Vietnam was still a relatively fresh memory. You could have a guy who had seen the elephant over there who was still less than 40 years old. The stories about the reliability issues of early M16’s were still being loudly preached. In fact, I know a guy here in town, former crew chief on a Chinook, who has nothing but venomous spite for the gun.

Calibers were strictly .223 and the flavor of the day was 55 gr. ball. Maybe 52 in some batches. Ar’s in other calibers wouldn’t be a readily available thing for a number of years.

Accessories were limited…you could buy surplus USGI 3-mag ALICE pouches and that was pretty much it.  You had a GI cleaning kit in the buttstock. A GI sling finished the ensemble.

Nowadays, of course, its a different story. The AR is a ubiquitous platform with dozens of manufacturers, hundreds of third-party accessory manufacturers, a dozen calibers, and the modualr aspect of the rifle has been amplified and improved over the sixty years this thing has been around.

Which brings me to my new FN. It’s as far a cry from one of my early CAR-15’s as you can imagine. It’s more adaptable to things like lights and optics, is probably more reliable, has a freefloated barrel, and is probably more accurate with its heavier profile.

So, long story to simply say that I’m getting to be an old dude who can say “I remember when…”.

But..new toy, so yay!

‘Tis the anniversary of that unique subset of Americans – the Roof Korean.

For those who don’t recall, or, like me, never get tired of hearing the story, the Roof Korean was the name given to the Korean shopkeepers who grabbed their thundertoys, climbed up on the roof of their business, and persuaded would-be trouble makers to go elsewhere.

It’s a fascinating and inspiring story. The moral of that story is that sometimes things go sideways to the point that an AR, plate carrier, and a half dozen of your best friends with AR’s and plate carriers is exactly what the doctor ordered.

I missed it, but yesterday was the anniversary of the 1992 LA Loot-n-Scoot Championships… aka The LA Riots. This was the event that gave us the legendary Roof Koreans.

This was before the 1994 Assault Weapons ban, so there was a decent amount of non-neutered hardware around but there wasn’t the emphasis on tactical gear and accoutrements that we see nowadays. What would ‘Roof Korea 2022’ look like?

Well, first off, there’d be, IMHO, a metric crap-ton more AR-15s than were seen back in ’92. I also think youd see a lot more tactical vests, plate carriers, communications, and that sort of thing. I suspect there’d also have been a lot more small-unit activity than just a buncha guys lined up like Alamo defenders.

Although the Roof Koreans did a fabulous job, I maintain that the championship award for Defending His Business Against All Comers should go to gun dealer Harry Beckwith who used an M16, S&W76, shotgun, and revolver in a 105-round bullet party that turned a crash-n-grab gun store burglary into a statistical outlier.

But, thirty years ago the Roof Koreans created a name for themselves and,. I suspect, might have created enough of a legned to temper would-be rioters even today.

Do you know what immurement is? Its a form of execution that has been seen sporadically up to the twentieth century. Succinctly, you seal someone up in a confined space and leave them to die. The stories I’ve read usually involve castles that have a condemned person thrown into a room and then the exits/entrances to the room are walled up. The person is left in the dark to die of thirst and hunger. I believe there are a couple tales in classic literature (Poe?) about someone being ‘walled up’ or ‘walled in’, in a similar manner.

But..those were unwilling participants. Could you imagine a circumstance under which you’d pick a half dozen men to volunteer to willingly be entombed in a concrete bunker…sealed in….with several years worth of supplies and the instructions that they remain sealed in until their jobs were done? Such is…Operation Tracer.

NATO had Gladio, the Nazis had Werewolf, and apparently the Brits has operation Tracer…a plan for some ‘stay behinds’ to, well, stay behind and monitor ship movements from the tactical advantage Gibraltar offered.

Turned out the plan was never activated because the Axis never took over Gibraltar. The secret bunker was sealed up and glossed over and disappeared from history and into legend. Until some spelunkers investigating rumours re-discovered it.

The concept is fascinating, of course. But what I’m more curious about is what you put on the shopping list when you’re pitting six guys into a sealed box for,at least, a year. This exercise is actually not much different than planning for a space mission or a submarine tour, I suppose. But, nonetheless, I find it fascinating and thought I would share.

We joke about bunkers around here, but it’s interesting to note that some people not only planned to make a hidden bunker but actually planned to be entombed within it like some sort of military Houdini-esque escape trick.

Yeah, I bet that’s what they said eighty years ago.

The attack on Pearl Harbor had no parallel in US history until 9/11. Both events, on the surface, came out of nowhere and both reshaped the world afterwards. To me the biggest lesson learned is to not get into the mindset that ‘it cant happen’. It’s all happened before and it’ll all happen again. In just one morning, the entire trajectory of the world changes for decades to come. It can actually happen that fast. Mind-boggling when you think about it.