My Gohds

I have discovered something else I really, really hate.

When the buyer is not the person making the decision about the purchase.

I am passively trying to sell an M4 clone I have.

One of The Lovely Harvey's co-workers' husband husband's friends expressed some interest.

Wanted details, all kind of details. I provided them. The kind of questions he was asking indicated that he didn't know much about this type of gun.

Asked what I wanted for a price. I told him.

He replies that his co-worker, a licensed manufacturer and THE gun guru says that only a Colt is worth that price and that it was only worth $100 less than I paid for the parts. Oh, then why didn't you buy a gun from him?

I was not selling to him, I was selling to his buddy. His buddy, who was not going to actually purchase anything.

He later replied that he'd bought a CMT A2 clone for $600 before he started talking to me. This great deal will forever cement the value of an AR in his mind. I wonder if his buddy will tell him that CMT doesn't sell to civilians, only military and law-enforcement, and that the guy he bought from likely had a hot gun. CMT's civilian sales are branded "Stag Arms".

The AR world would be greatly enhanced by the demise of either Colt or the people who drink the Colt Kool-Aid, or both.

There are tables where other brands are compared to Colt and the basis of comparison is a list of things that Colt does against whether the other company does that or not. Never is it said if those things are necessary. Some things, yes, some things no. Some things are absolute requirements for a selective fire rifle, and are a useless extra expense for a semi-auto.

Colt-Aid drinkers are fond of quoting that Colt is "Milspec". Would that be MIL-C-70599 (M4), MIL-C-71186 (M4A1), MIL-R-63997B (M16A2) or MIL-R-71135 (M16A2E3)? Those are what the military uses to buy M16s and M4s. They don't really tell you much about how to make a rifle. They merely specify the testing procedures for acceptance of the rifles. When you take that crutch out from under them, they fall back on "Colt uses their Technical Data Package". The TDP is merely the process that Colt uses to meet the spec and it's what the Colt-Aid drinkers are quoting with their comparison lists. FN, who won the contract to make M16A2 and M16A4 don't use Colt's TDP because the TDP is proprietary.

EDIT: I am willing to put the parts I selected against the name brand guys any day of the week for accuracy or endurance. There's not a rifle in my cabinet I don't trust to function when the chips are down.

Update: The likelihood of a CMT branded rifle being stolen from a police department or illegally sold by an LEO is quite high. Another consideration is a pre-ban configuration AR from CMT that isn't hot is also very likely to be no longer in its original condition, meaning that non CMT quality parts may have been used.