I’m going to continue the dismantling of M14 mythos a bit more from Sunday.
I am also going to acknowledge that we probably, given our national pension for weirdness and choices, would’ve ended up with an inch pattern FAL instead of metric… because America.
That wouldn’t have been the end of the world by any means, the Brits did well with their L1A1s but it was funny to hear of ground forces picking up the Argentinian metric ones with the giggle switches during the Falkland Islands campaign.
Anyway, the FAL should have been the NATO service weapon. The M14 and G3 were spawned out of weird politicking more than practicality if you look at the history of both. But the FAL remains in a more competitive state of operative obsolescence than the M14 does, which I will happily declare to be truly obsolete.
I don’t want this to get too into the weeds on the M14 since I’m sharing a FAL video, however the control scheme on the 14/M1A is what pushes it over the brink for me. It just cannot be run as efficiently as any other 20th or 21st Century fighting rifle it is competing against. It’s stacking inefficiencies and problematic accuracy maintenance ultimately shelf it. It isn’t that it doesn’t work, or doesn’t shoot, or falls apart like a budget build AR that never saw a torque wrench, it just remains the worst of the best of the mid 20th century battle rifles and we need to stop carrying water for it just because it was nostalgically adequate.
