Remember I said in my Slide Fire Solutions SSAR-15 Stock – M4/AR15 Legal Full Auto (for a price) post that if I had a chance to try one I’d write a review? Here it is.

Gun dealer, TEOTWAWKI homeboy said, “Come on over and try it out.” I filled to magazines, grabbed my 20″ AR upper and went over. When I arrived he already had the stock mounted on an AR lower with a CMMG .22lr upper. He had heard from another guy that it was possible to get the stock to function with the .22lr upper.

“Let’s go out back,” dude said. So, in a rural-type neighborhood, we went out behind his house and walks a few hundred yards into the woods. “This, right here,” he said, pointing at the ground, “is 300′ from my house and the neighbors” (no houses behind him, the direction we’d be firing, just beside him). “One neighbor is on the state police tactical team, and he won’t care. He might come out to see what we’re doing. The other neighbor is drunk all the time, and although I don’t come out here to shoot often, he usually comes to yell at me when I do.”

“Sounds pleasant,” I thought.

We started with the .22lr upper pictured here on the floor of dude’s garage:

It didn’t work. There wasn’t enough recoil to let the SSAR stock “bump fire” the next round. Dude said his buddy that claimed to get it to work with the .22 upper used a match trigger in the lower, and that maybe that was the difference …. ? I don’t know, but I plinked a few .22 rounds out of it and we promptly moved to the 5.56 upper.

Dude goes first, pulls the trigger, keeps forward pressure on the foregrip and …. “ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba!” A steady stream of shell casing came spitting out, lead spraying down range and the muzzle immediately climbed up. Dude paused, looked back at me with a shit eating grin and “ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba!” Then he laughed. We both laughed.

Then I muckled onto the bad boy and gave that dirt hill I was aiming at holy ole hell. “Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba!” Then it was my turn to wear a shit eating grin. The rifle cycled too fast, actually. Shell casings were a mere few inches apart as they spat out in a steady stream. The muzzle climb was ridiculous. I don’t know how you could come anywhere near fire a controlled, quality burst at a target that way. The first round coming out would be on, but after that, the barrel end was all over the place. Ideally the rifle would get a muzzle brake on the end to help control the climb in a situation like this, but …. we didn’t have one of those.

After the sound of a few magazines of full-auto went sailing through the forest, sure enough, the drunk neighbor came walking through the woods toward us. Gun dealer dude stopped firing, lowered the rifle. Drunk dude was maybe 10′ away from me and the smell of hard booze was overbearing at that distance. The conversation went something like this:

“What are you doing!?” asked drunk dude.

“I’m shootin,’” said firearm dude.

“You can’t shoot out here, you’re on my land.”

“No, I’m on my land. Those are my property pins right over there. I’m 300′ from every house. XXX doesn’t care” (XXX = name of tactical team neighbor).

“I don’t give a [expletive] about XXX. It sounds like you’re shooting inside my house. I’m going to call someone. We’ll see about this.”

“Go ahead and call. I’m in the legal clear.”

“What are you doing?” he asked again, swaying slightly from the booze. “You’re a jerk!”

Then there was a period of uncomfortable silence where they were both just standing there staring at each other and me looking around at the beautiful trees. At one point during this moment of silence, I see drunk dude clench his fist and bring it up only to loosen it and wipe around his face. A few more meaningless words were exchanged and drunk dude walked off, promising this wouldn’t be the end of it. Eager to have the last word, firearm dude asks, “Can you find your way back?”

That moment was about as exciting as firing full auto with the Slide Fire stock. Firearm dude said the neighbor came to over to apologize the next day, theorized his wife gave him hell and made him.

That’s the bulk of my Slide Fire Solutions stock review. Would I buy one? No. It’s a fun toy, but it rips through already expensive ammo like nobody’s business. Firearm dude knew another guy that was going to insert a heavier buffer tube in the rifle to try slowing the rate-of-fire, but the end result would still be the same – lots of ammo in a short amount of time. HOT barrel!

The stock feels “sloppy” as it just moves freely back and forth on its own unless you turn the plastic locking mechanism underneath to hold it in place for single fire only. The stock would be far better if Slide Fire could somehow internalize the moving portion of the stock, so that all of the “sloppiness” was “hidden” inside and the stock was solid on the outside.

I don’t know much money Slide Fire Solutions is making on these things, but they must be making a killing. The minimum dealer order is somewhere on the order of $5,000 wholesale price. At a retail price of about $350 each, for a simple piece of molded plastic, no buffer, no spring, just molded plastic, they must be making money hand over fist.

Will the feds ban these things? Perhaps some day. I’d imagine it’d take one incident where some psycho freak or gang banger opens up with one before it happens. No loss for me. I don’t want one, can’t see why anyone would unless you’ve just got money to burn and/or you have an AR-15 hobby (a.k.a. Black Rifle Disease).

But if they could internalize the stock’s movement and somehow configure it to tri-burst … hmmm …. that might tempt me, but …. I don’t see it happening.

- Ranger Man

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So my gun dealing SHTF Survival homeboy emails me the other day with “slide fire anyone?” in the subject line. The body of the email was simply:

I’ve got 1 to sell; $330 tax and all.

“Slide Fire?” you ask. Yes – THIS:

It’s a stock that makes the civilian version of the M16 or M4 fully automatic – legally! (It’s also available on Amazon by clicking here.)

“Impossible,” you say. “Not unless you go through the Class III federal tax stamp process and pay a boat load of money for one.”

Well, not exactly. It comes down to how you define “machine gun.” If I go thumbing through the ATF National Firearms Act Handbook I see that the ATF defines fully automatic as a firearm that discharges more than one round with a single pull of the trigger. That’s how the ATF defines it. I define machine gun as a rifle that can go “brrrrrip” firing a bunch of rounds in rapid succession. That’s what the Slide Fire allows, only instead of modifying the trigger for full auto, it allows for controlled bump firing. Slide Fire Solutions seems to have successfully circumvented the law with this stock. The ATF even issued a statement to the company stating that yes, in fact, the stock is legal.

Check this YouTube video for a full description of the the Slide Fire:

The first question that comes to my mind is - How long before the ATF’s definition of “machine gun” gets changed as a result of this? The intent with their legal definition of machine gun was to prevent exactly what the Slide Fire allows. I suspect it’ll take one news worthy incident with the Slide Fire before someone in Congress submits a bill that has traction. You’ll just need to see some freak out of his mind use the Slide Fire to mow people down before the general public gets clued in to what this thing can do. Or maybe it’d take these things showing up in large volume in Mexican drug wars. Once an incident like that happens you can bet that the Slide Fire will become unavailable as everyone will suddenly decide they “need” to get one of these before they’re banned.

The second questions that comes to my mind is – Does one really “need” a Slide Fire (or full auto)?

My first impression of the Slide Fire was “woah, that looks like a ton of fun.” Then I saw the $300+ price (way too high for a basic stock). I thought, “but this could be an investment once they’re banned.” Then I realized how many times I’ve used the “investment” argument to justify unnecessary purchases.

If I think about the Slide Fire and its cost from a SHTF preparedness perspective I’m faced with the how will this help improve preparedness debate. I’ve never served in the military, but if I think of a SHTF collapse environment as mirroring a societal collapse that includes war-like survival, I’d imagine a fully automatic rifle’s primary purpose is for suppressive fire, to keep the enemy pinned down while your comrades advance. No?

Of course, multiple rounds being fired in a survival situation is better than one round – or is it? What’s the shot placement accuracy rate of bullets fired from a fully automatic rifle? Is one well placed round better than a several randomly fired rounds? Yes. Much better.

Then again, with the Slide Fire, you could still fire one round at a time OR go fully automatic. You could have the best of both worlds.

But for $300+ price my mind starts wandering to other things I could do with that money. Winter is coming and I’d like to buy a decent pair of cross country skis. I wouldn’t mind replacing my sub-zero winter sleeping bag for winter hiking. Both of those items do not come cheap, and unlike the Slide Fire (which would cost even more through unnecessary “wasting” of expensive bullets), cross country skis and a winter sleeping bag would get much more use. They’d also work to improve my health during the winter months when it’s harder to be active outside.

If I was rich it wouldn’t be a question, give me a Slide Fire. But I’m not rich. Money isn’t falling off trees. So in the end, it’s no Slide Fire for me. If I need to fire rapid rounds, it’s not that hard to pull the trigger fast. I’ll save my money for something more … practical.

I’d like to try a Slide Fire, though. Maybe I shall, and if I do, will review here.

- Ranger Man

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The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), a trade association for the firearms industry, puts out some interesting stuff once in a while. Their latest piece is a survey called “21 Findings About Modern Sporting Rifle Owners.” By “modern sporting rifle” what they mean are rifles based on the AR platform. There was a boom in sales of AR rifles from late 2008 through early 2010 (the post-Obama election firearm buying frenzy).

Eager to learn more about owners of AR-style rifles (for marketing purposes, I’m sure), they conducted a survey. Included in the survey are 21 interesting facts about AR gun owners.

1. 60% of AR owners own more than one, with the average being 2.6
2. 30% purchased their first rifle in 2009 or 2010
3. 99% of owners owned some type of firearm prior to their first AR purchase
4. 90% owned a handgun first, and 34% of those under the age of 35 owned a paintball gun first
5. 44% of owners are current or former military or law enforcement members
6. 51% of owners have a shooting-range membership
7. 80% of owners purchased their AR rifle new
8. 39% of owners purchased their most recent AR rifle at an independent retail store, with the average price being $1,083
9. 75% of the ARs most recently purchased were chambered in .223/5.56mm
10. AR owners consider accuracy and reliability to be the 2 most important things to consider when buying an AR
11. 84% have at least 1 accessory on their rifle, and they spend an average of $436 on after-market accessories and customization
12. 71% of AR owners use a scope or red-dot as their primary optics. Older owners prefer scopes; younger owners prefer red-dot optics.
13. The 3 most-owned accessories were a sling (81%), soft carrying case (70%) and mounted scope (68%)
14. 33% of AR rifle owners use a 30-plus round magazine most often on their rifle
15. 25% of those who own 3 or more ARs describe their ARs as heavily accessorized (4-plus accessories)
16. Recreational target shooting was the No. 1-rated reason for owning an AR in terms of importance (89%), home defense was next (77%), followed by collecting (63%) and varmint hunting (6%).
17. 95% of owners said they have used their ARs in the last 12 months, and 29% of owners shoot their rifles more than once per month
18. 25% of owners shot more than 1,000 rounds out of their AR rifles in the last 12 months
19. 80% of owners feel they have not been able to shoot their rifle as much as they would have liked in the last 12 months
20. Not having enough free time and the cost of ammunition are the 2 main issues preventing AR-style rifle owners from shooting as much as they’d like.
21. The typical AR-style rifle owners is 35-plus years old, married and has some college education.

I don’t know the exact research methodology used, but I’m guessing whatever gun owner data they pulled was probably from a source that contains avid gun owners. That could skew the statistics some. For example, I know that AR style gun owners tend to really like the rifle (you’d have to if you’re spending that much money), but I question whether the typical AR rifle owner actually owns 2.6 of them. That sounds high.

The fact that 30% of all owners surveyed bought their rifle in 2009 or 2010 was a surprise. I knew that number would be high, but not that high. I knew a lot of former military and police would own ARs, but not to the tune of 44%. I guess they liked what they used, or maybe they just like it because they’re already familiar with it.

It wasn’t that surprising to me that the typical AR owner is 35+ with a college education. Nor was it a shocker that younger owners prefer red-dot optics and older owners like scopes.

If you own an AR, do the stats describe you?

- RM

BTW: I searched Google news for “AR-15″ to see what turned up. The majority of results fell into 1 of 2 categories, ARs used in crimes, and police departments looking to purchase ARs. Then there was this article, from Maine even, on FBI and state police arresting a man on federal firearms charges. The guy was reportedly obsessed with training to fight and that he had:

… buried “go bags” made out of 5-gallon buckets at strategic locations on his property, and that the bags contained firearms, food, and other equipment he might need if police came to get him.

He supposedly smoked a ton of dope and had an angry streak. The story and comments are interesting – read the article here.

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