#Upgrade

I love the ERGO Gapper. It’s an ingeniously simple device that makes a huge difference in AR comfort. Please allow me to share with you the best $3 you can spend on your rifle.

It was time for an upgrade – that’s simply why Stag Arms decided to upgrade their Stag 15 Tactical rifle line. The new 2022 Stag-15 Tactical rifles have six new features: Ballistic Advantage Hanson profile barrels, VG6 Delta flash hiders, ambidextrous configurable safeties, Breach ambidextrous charging handles, Hiperfire RBT triggers, and the upgraded rifles come with Magpul Gen3 PMAG magazines. Let’s take a closer look.

When I was a highschooler (early 2000’s), I drove a 1989 long bed extended cab ¾ ton Chevy pickup. It was brown and had a squeaky contractor rack on it.  My family purchased it new and we had it ever since. It had terrible fuel economy and was a beast to park, but I was just happy to have a vehicle to drive, and I will have to say it was reliable.  There are rifles just like that old truck on the market today – not much to look at, kind of clunky, but at least they go bang when you pull the trigger. The Tikka T3 is not one of these rifles. It has an excellent adjustable single stage trigger, a shorter bolt lift with a glassy smooth travel, and a barrel that will consistently print sub moa groups.  I would liken the Tikka T3 rifle to a Honda Civic as opposed to my old brown pickup.

The Commandant of the United States Marine Corps (CMC) has stated his approval for an overhaul of the front-line infantry Marine’s gear – including the fielding of the Heckler & Koch M27 Infantry Automatic Rifle as a standard issue rifle, to replace the M4 Carbine. The move comes after considerable debate as to what the USMC’s next infantry weapon configuration should look like. From Military.com’s KitUp!:

After being cancelled in mid-2016, could the M4 Carbine upgrade program still be alive? That is the suggestion from a line in the US Army’s justification for its research budget in the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, which references an “M4A2 Plus Rifle” as a new weapons development effort:

Several models of rifles from manufacturer SIG Sauer are now being recalled, the company announced in a release Friday. The issue stemmed from a problem in the heat treatment of the hammer of SIG’s two-staged trigger used in the SIG716 DMR, SIG516 Carbon Fiber, and SIGM400 Predator models. SIG’s release claimed that over time, this flawed heat treatment could cause a malfunction “creating a significant safety hazard”. Therefore, SIG is issuing a mandatory recall on these models, so that their trigger assemblies can be replaced, free of charge. According to the release, no law enforcement guns are affected by the recall.

Century Arms announced a Product Safety Warning and a Severe Duty Upgrade notice for some of the Canik 9mm pistols. The 9mm pistols covered by these announcements are the TP9SA, TP9SF, TP9SFx, TP9SF Elite and TP9SF Elite-S.  According to Century Arms no other Canik pistols are covered by these two announcements.

In a surprising turn of events given the recent public motions towards an all-M27 fleet, the United States Marine Corps has just released a new request for information (RFI), soliciting proposals from the industry for a whole new suite of infantry equipment, including rifles, upper receivers for existing weapons, optics, suppressors, and targets. The new RFI is very explicit as to what the industry can and/or should bring to the table as far as proposals. Below is replicated the “Infantry Rifle” segment of the RFI document, which is just one part out of five:

Since its introduction in 2009, the Marine Corps’ M27 Infantry Automatic Rifle has proven itself as an effective support weapon that offers more firepower and range than the Corps’ other squad level weapons, the M4 Carbine and M16A4 Rifle. This good reception has led many within the Corps to reach an obvious conclusion: The USMC should simply replace their M4s and M16A4s in the Infantry Battalions with M27 IARs. This idea gained so much traction that the USMC has experimented with arming an entire battalion with IARs, and even released an RFI to the industry for 11,000 more IARs.

I love my original Glock 17. I really do. I’ve never hated the platform, not since I first fired it. Sure, there were some slight bothers (like the gritty trigger) but nothing that was insurmountable.

The AK-12 is dead. Long live the AK-12! That’s the song Kalashnikov Concern is singing this week at the recent ARMY 2016 expo in Moscow, Russia. The radical AK-12 prototypes that have dominated Kalashnikov’s press over the past two years are gone, replaced by a more conservative rifle – also called “AK-12” – based on the Concern’s previous AK-400 prototypes. The new rifle addresses the Russian Army’s concerns regarding the AK-12’s cost and issues in fully automatic fire, an anonymous source told TFB, and is expected to be much cheaper to build than the previous model. It incorporates many of the same improvements developed for the previous AK-12 model, but improves the strength and resilience of some of the components.

KE Arms has announced their new line of slides for Glock pistols.  I had the pleasure of shooting with some of KE Arms creations at Superstition Mountain Mystery 3-Gun this past April, and while I am personally on the fence about using an optic on a pistol, I can attest to the workmanship of their builds and components.

S&T Motiv, the successor to Korean defense company Daewoo Precision Industries, was showing off a new variant of their K2 rifle that equips the Republic of Korea Armed Forces, alongside the M16A1 which remains in use with second-line units. The new rifle is called the K2C1, and features a new quad accessory rail replacing the previous plastic handguard, full-length 1913 Picatinny optics rail, and AR-15-style six position collapsing butt, which also folds. The new rifle will come in two variants, short and long barreled, with 305mm (12″) and 465mm (18.3″) barrels.

The US Army’s plan to wrap new technologies and commercial off the shelf (COTS) improvements into the M4A1 rifle has apparently been canned. The program, called M4A1+, was originally intended to upgrade the M4A1 fleet with new COTS rails, back up sights, flash hiders, triggers, and other improvements, but it seems the service will push forward with the basic 22-year-old M4A1 design for now. ArmyTimes reports:

As most readers know, my chosen shooting platform is the Glock, Generation 4. Despite its continued commercial success, I swear that it still remains the step-child of the aftermarket, as nearly everyone only offers various components for the Generation 3 editions including slides, springs, etc.