I remember when anti-gun claimed the forward assist on the civilian AR was there to get around the law. Their claim was if the forward assist ‘switch button’ was pushed while firing it made the gun fire full auto thus making the semi-auto rifle an illegal ‘machine gun’.

Anti-gun also claimed a ‘full auto bolt’ inserted into a semi-auto AR would make the semi-auto an illegal machine gun and fire full auto.

Anti-gun people are not really grounded in the truth or fact. This is why they tend towards using generalizations and need to create terms they can define anyway they want to appeal to emotion and ignorance and confirmation bias. For example,, you see these techniques used here by Miner49er in his left wing looney mental illness TDS rants where he starts plugging in made up stuff already known to be false.

This is true. Plus, the original Air Force versions were semi-auto only and some of them used lowers that were dual stamped with ‘Armalite’ stamped over with ‘Colt’. Fjr the Air Firce versions Colt had used some lowers that Armalite had produced to fill the contract on time as they didn’t have enough Colt made lowers. So they took the Armalite lowers and stamped them with ‘Colt’ over the ‘Armalite AR-15’ and stamped on the rest of the Colt stuff. It was like 100 of them.

After the rifle was accepted for service, the US Army M16s had a forward assist. The US Air Force M16s did not.

So we almost ended up with a no charging handle design. Colt squashed it to add the forward assist. What Stoner really wanted to do in consulting with Colt was get them to implement his other ideas for the platform that he didn’t have a chance to do at Armalite. But history shows he was not successful at doing that.

I’m gonna go through the transcripts of the Stoner interview tapes I have. I seem to remember him talking about arguing against a forward assist when he was consulting with Colt on their redesign.

But if I remember correctly now…the military wanted ‘something’ because troops complained about the bolt carrier thus bolt not going fully forward. Colt came up with the forward assist idea. Stoner objected and argued he had considered similar in his redesign military adaptation of the original civilian version but decided it wasn’t necessary but had considered a modification redesign of the upper and bolt carrier to get rid of the charging handle and use a bolt handle on the bolt carrier and that could also be used to push the bolt carrier thus bolt forward if needed. Colt wasn’t going to do that, too much redesign, and added the forward assist.

Colt created the forward assist in their redesign of the AR-15 Stoner version patent. That payent design derived from the original and first AR-15 design which was a civilian market only rifle. The original civilian only design was not marketed and further use of its design became Stoner s adaptation for military use and carried forth the AR-15 designation that was originally assigned to the first and original civilian only version. Stoner did not add a forward assist as he thought it not necessary.

Colt implemented the forward assist in the XM16E1, but not until around 1964. So it did not appear before then.

I was just wondering if I brain farted on that. I do not remember a forward assist on my issue weapon. I do remember the 20 round mags.