Ar-15?

[The Commander]

Someone explain to me: what is exactly with the AR and CAR disignations? What is what?

;4

[Gecko10]

Definitions, as I understand them. There are a lot of full length books addressing this topic so it will be hard to cover everything in a short response.

AR - A whole family of military style rifles originally designed by Eugene Stoner and manufactured by ARmalite and later Colt.

There are two basic subgroups:

AR-16 which includes the M16, M16A1 and M16A2. These are the ones normally only sold to the military and law enforcement and are either semi-auto, select fire and full auto versions.

AR-15 Civilian versions of the AR-16, semi-auto only. These include the A2 with a fixed carry handle A3 flattop receiver and M4 which has a different barrel profile.

CARbine any of the above versions with a short barrel usually around 16" or so.

Black Rifle Club - The best place to post this to get good answers. ;)

[DJ Niner]

And to compound your (and our) confusion, each manufacturer attempts to use an easily-remembered model designation for their weapons, in hopes that it will pop in to a customer's mind when they go gun shopping. For instance:

Manufacturer......Model Name

Armalite............M-15
Bushmaster.......XM-15 E2S; also other word-based model names.
Colt..................AR-15 (old); Match Target (new)
etc.

Can anyone else fill in some more blanks, here?

[madcapmagician]

The CAR designation was originally used in Vietnam to name the XM177, which is the original M4. It was easier to say the Car-15 instead of XM177. The CAR designation has just stuck to the automatic carbines since then.