Mil-Spec
By Robb Manning
Everything But the Kitchen Sink
In the Age of the AR, there is no shortage of accessories to enhance your rifle. Scopes, red dots, magnifiers, bipods, vertical grips, lasers, vertical grips with lasers, flashlights, vertical grips with flashlights, vertical grips with flashlights and lasers with pop out bipods, video cameras, bayonets, iPhone mounts, etc. Some people feel a need to mount every single one of them on their AR. Even though it’s far more practical to configure your AR to suit your intended use.
My first 15 years of owning an AR, I resisted mounting accessories on mine. I kept my ARs stock, with factory stock front grips. Iron sights. Mostly because if that was good enough for Uncle Sam when I served, that was good enough for me now. Yes, that was truly flawed thinking. Then we entered two wars that featured the M4 as the dominant weapon, and shortly thereafter the onslaught started of accessories hitting the civilian market. The utilitarian side of me realized my AR could be far more useful if it had a couple of accessories.
First there was the red-dot scope, which is a huge upgrade from iron sights. It’s always nice to have iron sight backups, but a red-dot is far more efficient at target acquisition. From red-dots to high-magnification scopes, are so many excellent choices in optics for ARs, sometimes it’s difficult to choose which one suits your purpose better. So people started mounting multiple scopes -- one on the flat top, and one canted at 45 degrees.
Then I added a flashlight, because it’s important to see what you’re shooting at. Using it for home defense, as a father of three young ones, identifying before you aim is critical. Sometimes I’ll add a compact laser, it doesn’t take up much space. But this is about it for my home defense rifle. I don’t need anything else on it, and adding more stuff defeats the purpose of owning a carbine -- having it be light and compact. I don’t need a bipod, because I’m not going to be sniping at someone in my house from 100 yards away, and I’m not going to be laying down cover fire. I don’t need a vertical grip, either, because I’m not going to be shooting long, rapid strings of fire in my home.
That’s not to say that given a different mission these accessories aren’t useful. I do a lot of hunting with my ARs. When shooting coyotes, nothing is more useful than a bipod. For walking out to my deer stand, I like to keep a flashlight on mine to find my way in the dark (I prefer and carry a handheld, but just last year I had the battery go out on mine, and at the end of the day, I would have been attempting to walk back in pitch black if not for the light I keep in my AR). A laser is also a good addition -- in some parts of the country you never know when you could bump something up with tooth and claw, that doesn’t like you bumping them up. A laser is good medicine for unexpected close encounters.
The moral of the story: keep your AR configuration simple, and purpose driven. It’s not necessary to add everything onto one AR, and can actually degrade from its light and compact qualities. Additionally, it can lead to unnecessary -- but admittedly fun -- fads. That’s how the whole zombie fad got started. Armchair commandos trying to rationalize all the accessories on their rifle. But they couldn’t, because there isn’t any, so it became a joke that they were “preparing for the zombie apocalypse.” That joke became a HUGE marketing campaign from firearm and accessory companies, and now you see the results of that; zombie stuff everywhere. If you want to rationalize all of the accessories mounted on your AR, that’s fine. But you don’t have to do it under the pretense that you will some day be fighting off Zombie Hordes.
While I don’t keep most of my ARs in stock configuration like I used to, I also don’t go overboard and over accessorize them. There’s a lesson to be learned -- and I’ve never been accused of being a fashion expert -- from looking at Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler on the dangers of over-accessorizing. Not only is it not-practical, it looks simply ridiculous. Minimize the accessories on your AR, and you’ll optimize it’s utility.