THE M-16 RIFLE

Dissatisfaction in the "Battle Rifle" concept of US Army in the late 1950's caused an issue for lighter selective-rifle with smaller caliber. One of the such rifles offered for the US Military was AR-15, designed by Eugene Stoer at Armalite. This rifle was in fact scaled-down AR10, redesigned to fire new small-caliber cartridges .223 Remington (developed at Sierra Bullets; based on .222 Remington hunting cartridge). AR15 have same gas-driven rotary-bolt mechanism without the gas piston, as an AR10. Armalite sold this design to Colt, and when US Army adopted AR15 in 1957 under official designation of M16, all further modifications were made by Colt. Then-new M16s were sent to Vietnam, where many problems were found. Due to "dirty" design (powder gases vented directly into receiver) M16 were very prone to stoppages and jams when insufficient cleaning was applied. Also polymer hand guards, grips and butt stocks were found too fragile for battle environment. In 1967 M16 was modified into M16A1 version. Improvements included a pushbutton on right side of the receiver, which was used to close the bolt in case of cartridge feed failure (so called "forward assist device") and some other changes, including brass deflector to prevent spent cases from hitting in the face of the left-handed soldier, and new 30 rounds box magazine instead of the original 20 rounds magazine.
In early 1980s M16 was modernized again, now into the M16A2. Major upgrade was new, heavier barrel with new rifling, to accept new cartridge SS109 with heavier bullet (designed in Belgium by FN). This upgrade gave the bullet fired from M16A2 more flat and stable trajectory. Other upgrade was done to fire selector - new mode of fire - 3 round burst was added to single-shot and full-auto modes of the original M16. New dual-aperture peep-hole sight with bot elevation and wind age adjustment was also installed, along with new circular-cross shaped hand guard instead of the old triangular-cross shaped one.
Latest modification of AR15/M16 family is M16A3, which is exactly the same as M16A2 except for integral carrying handle, which is replaced by Pica tinny-Weaver rail system to accept different types of scope mounts, laser-aiming devices etc. Carrying handle with iron sights, similar to that of M16A2 also could be installed.
While being popular military rifle (adopted by nearly 30 countries, including USA, Canada, Israel and others), "civilian" and "law enforcement" clones of the M16 also gained significant popularity. Being marketed under many designations (such as AR15, M15, XM15 etc.), those clones are manufactured by many US and other countries companies, such as Bushmaster, Armalite, Professional Ordnance and others. Those guns may reproduce original M16s in everything excluding semi-auto trigger mechanism, or represent some improvements or tuning options (barrel lengths and styles (light, heavy, match)), butt stocks types etc.

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