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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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The day a brass-fed AR isn't the best choice, I've no doubt there will be someone ready to sell whatever is. AR killers are like Glock killers. There's fifty a year and none in ten. Everyone just makes slightly different Glocks and ARs because what we're optimizing for is peripherals, and popularity determines compatibility.

It's not that Glocks and ARs are the best things ever. But they are optimized for value and reliability, and there's so many of them that the industry innovation has been immense within those platforms. In many ways, standardizing on two weapon platforms let the civilian market go nuts with ways to modify and improve all the bits.

There was always going to be an inflection point where the idea of what a gun is stabilized around some reasonable approximation of the mature state of the art. You can see this as a lack of innovation, or a shift of innovation to the areas where serious progress is still possible, such as optics, lasers, weight etc.

The only part of the NGSW I think is conceptually sound is the optic, which in my view if it works, they should strap to full length accurized ARs in 5.56 or 7.62 and give to squad designated marksmen only.