PAUL SOLMAN, NewsHour Economics Correspondent: The M-16 semiautomatic rifle. With its shorter version, the M-4, it’s the gun of our troops in combat. The hat’s for the sun, by the way; the earmuffs for the noise. Jim Sullivan helped design this rifle during the Eisenhower administration.
JIM SULLIVAN, M-16 Co-Designer: （m16聯合發明人）Fifty years ago.
PAUL SOLMAN: Fifty years ago?
JIM SULLIVAN: Well, we started on it 50 years ago this month.
PAUL SOLMAN: That’s 1957, the year the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. In the half-century since, computers shrank from houses to handhelds; polio was cured; man made it to the moon and Mars. And what kind of advance was there in our combat rifle?
JIM SULLIVAN: They’re right exactly where they were when we gave them the M-16 in 1960. They haven’t advanced an inch.
PAUL SOLMAN: Meanwhile, the competition, says Sullivan, the Soviet-designed automatic Kalashnikov AK-47, is in its third generation, as the AK-74.
CALIBER ,5.56x45 NATO (.223 Rem.)
WEIGHT, 7.18 lbs (3.26 kg)
OVERALL LENGTH ,39.5 in. (100.33 cm)
BARREL LENGTH, 20 in. (50.8 cm)
RATE OF FIRE, 700-950 RPM
RIFLING, 1/7 RH
EFFECTIVE RANGE ,600 m
By 1996, the two newest versions of the M16 appeared, the M16A3 and M16A4. These differ from the M16A2 by having a removable carrying handle, with the upper receiver being fitted with a Picatinny-type accessory rail. Otherwise the M16A4 is similar to the M16A2, while the M16A3 also replaced the infamous three-round burst mode with a full auto mode. The key advantage of both the M16A3 and A4 rifles is the ability to quickly mount and re-mount a wide variety of optical, red dot or night vision / IR sights with MIL-STD 1913 (Picatinny-type) compatible mounts. The M4 carbine was also upgraded to “flat top” configuration, which is now standard.
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