this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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People: please do not carry an AK. Just get an AR. ARs have interchangeable parts, ammunition is cheap, and aside from Bear Creek Arsenal, they're going to just work. AKs require significant hand fitting and there's no single standard, ammunition prices have risen sharply since the cheap milsurp ammo flow got cut off, and at the cheaper end they tend to be dangerous to the user. Yes, I know that AKs have a reputation got working in adverse conditions, but that reputation dates to the Vietnam war, when the AR was a new platform; modern ARs are far, far more reliable and accurate than an AK.
You can still get an AK for fun, but don't don't treat it like your serious gun.
I have a buddy who did gun repairs, he fucking hates AR-15s. If you want a gun that ticks all the boxes, get a 12 gauge shotgun. It's a cheap, widely available platform that has cheap and widely available ammo, it just fucking works, it's easy to care for, easy to use, pretty standard maintenance, and will kill what you need it to. They're lethal much further out than video games imply, because otherwise they'd completely wreck the balance of the game.
Edit: I asked him for his specific beef with ARs, this was his response.
They're a bitch to clean. There's lots of places that need to be cleaned that can't be reached easily, tons of little pockets and grooves you can't get into; requires a dental pick, star shaped cleaning patches, and a shit load of cotton swabs to get through.
If it's locked up, you can't knock on the charging handle or emergency kick the charging handle to clear it. You will not be able to field strip this rifle if it's jammed out of battery.
Aluminum gas blocks are apparently very popular, and they will corrode to failure at the gas tube port.
The extractor pin will often shatter in place, which causes intermittent failure while not looking wrong unless you know what you're looking for.
The range of a shotgun kinda sucks, though, right? Amazing for home defense though, especially if you don't have acres of land.
Not really, no. It's true that you aren't going to be sniping anyone with a shotgun, and it's also dependent on the shot you're using, but shotguns are used to hit ducks in flight, turkey, and deer (among others), which are all usually going to be a bit further away than your average hallway. Generally, birdshot is worthless for people outside of very close range; I once ran a call where someone got shot with birdshot from across the street and they might as well have been hit point blank with an airsoft gun. If that had been buckshot or a slug, they would have been completely fried. The tradeoff that you do with shot is that a finer shot will have a wider and denser cloud of projectiles, but each of those projectiles has less mass (and therefore momentum) for penetrating power. Buckshot is basically throwing a handful of (smaller) old school ball shot at whatever you're pointing at, and whatever you hit is going to have a bad time. I personally prefer the heavier 000 (triple-ought) buck to 00 (double-ought) buckshot, but either works great. A slug is going to have the best range and penetrating power; at close range, a slug will defeat any non-ceramic body armor, and people wearing ceramic are still going to be very unhappy. Of course, a slug also requires the best aim, because it's just one solid chunk of metal. in either case, I would say that shotguns with buckshot and slugs are entirely appropriate for personal defense in or out of the home, and urban combat.