When he died in April 1997 at his home in Palm City, Fla., Eugene Stoner was a millionaire with about 100 patents to his name and, in the words of an obituary that ran in The New York Times, a reputation as “one of the world’s foremost designers of and experts on small arms.” In the late 1950s, working as an engineer for an upstart California company called ArmaLite, a division of the Fairchild Aircraft & Engine Corporation, Stoner had developed the AR-15 rifle.After some bureaucratic resistance and early mechanical issues, the AR-15, rebranded by the military as the M16 and manufactured by Colt’s Firearms Division in Hartford, Conn., made its way onto the battlefields of Vietnam and into the American popular imagination. Its profile became synonymous with the term “assault rifle,” and it stood in contrast to its Soviet counterpart, the AK-47, designed by Mikhail Kalashnikov in 1947. Lightweight, air-cooled, gas-operated, and magazine-fed, four variants of the M16 — the M16A1/A2/A3/A4 — have been used by the military since the 1960s. A more compact version of the M16A2, the M4 carbine, was introduced in the 1990s.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=93146