How Much Should You Spend On An AR-15? Tips & Guide

[Applause] what's up guys this is the honest outlaw here and today I want to answer one of the most highly requested questions that I get I want to talk about what should you pay for your ar-15 so today we have a couple air 15 sat out here and I think we had five of them out hundred a five of mine of different varying prices and quality and I want to talk about what price they are what features you should expect for that particular price line so first to talk about the cheapest ar-15 that I own and one of the cheapest air 15s I think on the market maybe the cheapest this is the ATI Omni and it is right around $300 now this is certainly an entry level here 15 but if you've seen any of my previous reviews I would avoid this for a couple of reasons but even still it represents kind of that 300 to $500 price range and even though this may not be the brand I would recommend there are other brands like maybe the Smith & Wesson M&P sport they kind of hover around that price range that have similar features that I want to talk about so first let's address the HEI Omni that trigger the gun itself is $300 and you get a very low quality air 15 for that price tag because it's a very low price and because of that you get a polymer upper and lower receiver I would stay away from that I would get a metal receiver of some kind whether it be billet aluminum or whatever hot fancy thing you want to go with the reason why I would stay away from the American tactical is because I had a lot of pretty serious reliability and parts breakage issues right away right out of the box so I had to change the bolt in order to get this particular rifle to work I had to change it to a BCM bolt because the bolt was not sized correctly to even fit in the star chamber correctly so I was having a lot of problems with that also the gas block right from the factory was very loose and I had to realign and tighten that because even on camera was having gas issues so beyond the actual operating system of the really beer 15 some of the features you can expect for the 300 500 dollar price tag and again guns like the M&P Sport won't have those issues I've had two of them in the past and both of them ran really well there are others as well but you're gonna expect a standard just regular old stock not bad not good either but it is collapsible and you can definitely work with it one of the reasons I would suggest the collapsible stock over something like a m16a1 which I can roll some footage in right now is that if you have smaller stature people in your house let's say your daughter son you want to teach if you're shooting some day or maybe your wife wants to use this for a home defense gun or whatever it may be a justin'll length of pole is a real benefit to people especially you're gonna shoot prone you might want the stock out and if you're gonna shoot standing up you're gonna want it maybe kind of in the middle and if you're one of those guys to use body armor or lb of some kind for your daily job or you just want to go out and train and play around with it you know you can put the stock in and it makes it more comfortable a standard milspec grip as well which is one of the least comfortable grips of all time especially if it's big old myth like me but not something you can't work around certainly usable you're gonna have a one-sided safety here somebody like my wife who was left-handed really likes an Hamby safety because you know it's easier to flip off the side although again doable you're gonna have a rack great milspec trigger now honestly for me you really have to start getting into the thousand to 1500 all range to start getting guns off the rack with more customized triggers and things like that we'll talk about that later but as far as most bike trigger goes that's pretty good to go you're going to get a standard handguard as well that doesn't allow you to mount any accessories and that is a one of the probably the biggest cons of the lower-priced a or 15s my personal opinion because you're gonna want something like a weapon light on it to use it for home defense or use it for law enforcement use or military use any you so you can really think of for an ar-15 that's serious use you're gonna want some sort of handguard would that be a short quad real long quad rail em lock rail keymod rail we're going to show you all those on the table here in a second so I've got them all on the table for quadrille I guess but you get the point quadrille is pretty easy just has four reels on each side quadrille ha and you probably won't come with any sights this one didn't it did come with a sight block on top of the gas block which is kind of nice because you can put flip-up sights on it to get them out of way of your optic and an optic is something i would recommend for your budget AR even if you buy 300 raar nowadays there's stuff like the Bushnell TRS 25 or the primary honest micro Don that are fairly reliable especially for the price tag they're around $100 and it's probably going to come with a 16 inch barrel and it's going to come with a a2 flash hider of some type because these are extremely cheap and actually they're actually pretty usable as well even on some guns that I have that are over $2,000 they still runs some type of an a2 flash hider because they're kind of it do it all do it all muzzle device they don't mitigate recall very much but they do compensate a little bit because the ports are on the top and they do mitigate a little bit of flash and they don't cause a lot of blast to the shooters around you so they are pretty useful even though they come on just about every ar-15 on the market now one thing you can expect as far as reliability and accuracy goes when it comes to a gun that's 300 to 500 is you're going to expect probably the lowest on the air 15 market now the good news about air 15 is they're inherently very accurate probably the most accurate combat rifle ever made so you're still going to be expecting some more between it depends on what brand but you're going to expect somewhere between 5 and 2 MOA for even a 300 to $500 a or 15 so accuracy unless you're shooting long range competitions or you're shooting the three gun competition or something like that something beyond a hundred yards accuracy even for a rack grade cheap air 15 is not going to be a horrible issue which are really gonna run into is parts and quality control and you're gonna run into reliability issues which we did on this particular rifle so because of that I would aim above the $500 mark and I would get you into a gun like this this is the radical firearm 0:15 full disclosure they did send me this gun but I get gun set to me all the time and it won't change my opinion and this doesn't represent the radical firearms it represents a different tier of air 15 so with this gun I'm going to be talking about the 500 dollar range so your Colts are gonna fit in here your addict will fire arms are gonna fit in here any number of quality or 15 sig is gonna fit in here and this is the category that I think most of you are gonna fit in very comfortably what this is gonna bring you over something like the API over something like some of the cheaper air 15 it's gonna bring you an extra level of reliability because the parts are gonna be made of higher quality they're gonna be all mil spec for the most part which is important because mil spec helps you you know design the whole system together you don't want to stack tolerances have different parts size here difference in our part size here and that eventually the whole system is just a mess also you're gonna get quality materials like you're gonna get aluminum some type of aluminum receiver which is really important and you're gonna get features like an EM lock rail or a keymod rail or a quad rail and like I said before that allows you to easily mount lights and vertical grips and whatever you want to put up here whatever your feint your you know a toaster to put your toaster strudel in and you can put flip-up sights or anything like that you want and only for a little bit more money you're going to be expecting a rifle it's gonna have a lot longer life as well so if this rifle goes you know this rifle actually want about 50 rounds before parks breakage let's say you get a Smith & Wesson M&P or something like that you're gonna get a little more quality but guns of this year are gonna get an even longer life and an even longer bear life as well before gonna have to change parts and you're gonna have a higher percentage of accuracy let's say an M&P or a higher level of reliability sorry so let's say the M&P is 99% reliable this is going to be 99.9% reliable so with a $500,000 rifle this is really what I would suggest for almost everybody it's gonna come with a standard gas block which is fine it's gonna come with a standard barrel a standard muzzle break most likely hemlock or keymod rail you're gonna have an all aluminum receiver this one actually came with a more vertical pistol grip which is really economic especially if you have the stock first all the way in it came with this mission first tactical stock which is much more comfortable than this and it's got a much more secure locking system so when you're going to shoot the rifle it's not going to be rattling around a little bit and it's just going to be one less thing you're gonna have to worry about when you're going to be shooting at long distance or shooting up close quickly this also came with an ambidextrous safety for you lefties out there which is a really big plus in my opinion and it also came with a more textured bolt release and a more textured magazine release which is a big plus and a bolt made of a stronger and more durable material than something like the $300 a year 15 so all around they're probably the biggest step up in the air 50 market is under 500 over 500 I would really suggest you go somewhere between 500 and $1000 for the teachers that I talked about here to get a little boost in accuracy as well but again not much I mean people will talk about it maybe as an MOA but in reality there's our little humming situation and military law enforcement situation or a home defense situation one minute of angle is really most of the time not going to make or break the situation a competitive situation maybe but most likely that's that's not going to be an issue and not something that I would really worry about when I'm purchasing a gun I would really worry about more quality control quality of parts and reliability and features of the fire now I'll move into something like the DCM now this is a VC m14 or this is a BGM 16 inch with a compensator now this gun came with a keymod rail back in ki Mott was the coolest thing and that's pretty cool it's got the kmr rail it's got a really good solid mounting system so some of the other key mod m-lok or even quadrilles on the market they don't have quite the sturdy mounting system that some of the higher-end rifles have like like the BCM I mean you could twist this as long as you want it's not going to go anywhere and it won't change the point of aim of your iron sights and it won't mess with any D ball or any laser or anything like that you're gonna have up there which is a big plus also this has a vertical grip and it has a compensator on it I forget what this exactly called it's like the BCM comp of some kind and it comes with a again an even higher quality of furniture set than the previous set did now this is the tier that I like to stick in for the most part I like BCM Daniel defense companies like that who make a totally rock-solid gun now imagine a gun like this well you get all the same features basically from each gun so that's why I said to step up from a thousand to a 15 in our $1500 gun isn't kind of as dramatic but you get a rock-solid absolutely reliable gun I mean guns like BCM for example have gone sixty thousand rounds with the minimal issues so if you want the same features of the previous but you want it to be rock solid reliable and you want it to be probably around 2m away something like that one and a half m away B seems really good way to go also you're going to be getting a higher higher quality materials so BCM is gonna be lighter weight again just more quality parts on a gun like this [Music] now we can move up to this what I would consider the 1500 to 2000 dollar range and this is not a this is not a stock rifle this is actually a Frankenstein gun built by me but I wanted to talk about some of the advantages and maybe this has over my standard BCM because this is a BCM it's a VCM barrel with a BCM upper receiver but in turn it has a cryptex coating low mass bolt carrier and it has a whole bunch of slick superfast options that I wanted to mention on a higher tier rifle so first off it's got a better stock this is a fab defense stock and in my opinion one of the best it has more of a cheek well it's very sturdy very reliable I got a video on this if you want to see it it's got the MIAD grip this is an adjustable grip so you can adjust the size of the grip for your particular hand this has a guys Lee two-stage trigger in it guys Lee makes some of the best custom triggers on the market because not only are they very smooth and very accurate but they're also very very reliable they don't change the mechanics much from these standard milspec triggers so you're not going to get any issues in reliability that you would with some of the really high-end custom triggers iron sights are top-notch these are mag pull em bus pro sights so instead of you didn't see any flip up sights in the market but these are not going to come with any plastic or any cheap sights these are gonna be absolutely 100% bomb-proof and reliable so whenever you flip them up you know because people have red dots use their flip up sights like once every fourteen years so when you do need them they will be there for you some of the real advantage of this rifle over that one though is it's going to be lighter weight and it's just gonna be more customizable to you so this has a I forget what type of material that lower but this is a 2a armament bailius light so the lower is going to be about six ounces less something like that four ounces less and the rail is from b7s and the rail is going to do the exact same thing as the BCM but it's going to do it for less weight it has a adjustable Adams arms I think gasps block so what that's going to do in conjunction with the low mass bolt carrier that I talked about is it's going to lower the recoil because you can adjust the amount of gas just to how much you need to run that particular ammunition if you're on a higher pressure ammunition you take an Allen print wrench turn it up or turn it down as needed so if you're gonna run a suppressor on here that's a really nice feature also that so you have less gas coming through the platform into the shoulders you're gonna have less recoil less muzzle flip add to that a lower weight bolt carrier that is less mass going backward as well so you're going to have a less recoil plus it's going to be less weight for the overall platform so basically what you're gonna get with the 1,500 to 2,000 dollar tear is you're going to get a little bit less recoil you're gonna give it a little bit more accuracy because the barrel is going to be a little bit more superior so maybe 1.5 even 1m away I have sub MOA barrels so we're going to talk about here in a second and you're gonna get a lot less weight and then advantage to a lot less weight is no matter how strong you are no matter how much you work out less weight it's always gonna be better so it's gonna be easier to hold up for longer periods of time most people think about less weight like to think about carrying the rifle like it's slung what I think about with less weight with a rifle is I think about how long I'm going to have to hold this rifle up and how quickly I'm going to be able to transition from target to target so in both those scenarios less weight especially up front is going to be better also this is a superior muzzle device and you've seen the other ones this is a BG gamma so this is actually a break compensator and flash hider combo it does a really really good job at mitigating the wreak loss of a cage to put over this to mitigate the blast problems if I go to a rifle class or something like that now we're getting the highest here this is my three gun air 15 and some of the things that it has over some of the previous ones again it has a little slight lower which I really like but it also has the bailius light match upper so it's a little bit less weight they're two they're matched together so all of this gun is designed to be super lightweight and it's designed to be super accurate super reliable with super low recoil so this is the this is my super high-speed low-drag bill basically so it's really really light for what it is it's lighter than every other rifle on the table even though it has a really thick bail and it has an optic this comes in it right around I think without the optics somewhere around five point seven pounds something like that so very light easy to transition easy to pick up a maneuver easy to carry all day it comes with a proof research barrel incredibly expensive and in my opinion a little overpriced for what you get basically you're gonna get a gun that dissipates heat really well it's a carbon fiber wrap barrel hard to kind of see in there under 1 MOA extremely accurate and it's very light also since the very thick barrel but it is carbon fiber carbon fiber is much lighter than metal it has a no you don't see every day the Gator driving down the highway anyway so it has a titanium gas block in it from SLR rifle works what does that give you it gives you the same adjustments as the previous but again lighter weight I think somewhere around 1 ounce it's ridiculous it feels like it's not even on the gun I have of these 7s and proved gas tube here I'm not really sure what that does but I bought a bunch of parts from v7s and threw it on there anyway LAN tech dragon muzzle brake crazy amounts of blasts in comparison to all the other muzzle devices that I've shown on here you have my wife hates it because she films this and just blasts right in her face all the time insert whatever joke you want there but it keeps the muzzle incredibly flat this is a gamer rifle now remember that keymod rail on here instead of em lock but I have it all covered up just came out isn't cool anymore it's just to keep the heat away from my hand because I do a lot of round counts for this the key MOT M lock rail discussion to me is ridiculous they both hold your accessories they're both relatively the same Emma Lock is stronger than keymod yes but if you have a keep on rail don't throw in the trash and get an M lock rail you're gonna be fine it also has a cryptex coatings bolt carrier unit again the whole low mass low gas system going backward this has an improved buffer system in it with some sort of a rubber thing in here that I wish I knew off the top of my head I've done a review in the past maybe I'll put it in the description below with that again less weight more spring all that stuff's all tuned specifically designed for my particular ammo that I shoot so it runs very very flat when I shoot it this has the badass safety lever so it's a bigger extended safety lever a lot of guns that are this price range run a 45 degree swing safety I personally don't like that I know a little bit faster and I know that comes on most of the high-end rifles but I don't like that I like a measure of safety when it comes to my safety I like to feel it and I like a measure of consistency with all my rifles so I keep it with that also running a guy's lead two-stage trigger in it a lot of people run or souped up like I used to have a guys III gun trigger in it and that makes you look really fast up close but I noticed of a sacrifice a little bit of accuracy point being is that a rifle of this quality's gonna have a tremendously amazing trigger in it especially if you buy it stock you buy like a cobalt Kinetics let's say or something of that quality you're gonna get a lot a lot of really good triggers no matter what sugar there's Tim knee AR gold whatever it's gonna be I'm also running a 1/8 optic on this right now I used to run a Trijicon 1/2 for I got this primary arms 1/8 but I've been running and that's pretty awesome also I'm really like a 1 to 8 scope because it basically gives you the opportunity at zero power you can shoot just like a red dot and at eight power you can go all the way out to six hundred yards so this gives it this particular rifle even though it's you know somewhere in the area of six pounds it's incredibly reliable incredibly fast incredibly accurate and it's capable from zero all the way to six hundred meters this is the most diverse rifle that I have in my particular collection and the good thing about a super expensive ar-15 that's done correctly with all the parts spec correctly and I built this rifle myself and I've probably built about 50 ar-15s in the past and I've learned from my particular mistakes what parts are stay away from what parts not to how to mix things together and that video would be hours and hours if I did that but basically if you get a really good high-end ar-15 whether you build it yourself or have somebody put it together and for your first time that's what I would absolutely recommend you're still gonna get all the super high-end high-speed low-drag stuff you're gonna get it without sacrificing reliability because that's the most important thing doesn't matter how much the rifle weighs doesn't matter how accurate rifle is is long is it functions correctly for almost every circumstance and if it starts to function kind of shitty but it is extremely accurate what does it matter because it doesn't work anything so I just wanted to go over a quick demonstration here and I know I ramble on locks and a lot about ar-15 and like the gun what can I say and I just wanted to show some of the features some of the other features are gonna get more expensive gun is gonna be a higher-end charging handle as well I've got a couple different ones on the table I'll talk about real fast this is my one of my old standby favorites this is a BCI ma'am be my wife's left-handed she shoots on my f-15 she loves ar-15s also girls love ar-15s because they're easy to shoot and they're low recoil and they still do the job the BCM is really nice but what I'm really leaning towards these days actually especially for my suppressed guns is gonna be this guy's lis charging handle here is that actually I don't know what they do what kind of black magic they do in there but they decrease the amount of gas that hits you in the face whether it be suppressed or a short railed rifle so I actually have these on my 10.5 here 15 pistol build as well so I hope I covered a few things I'm sure I forgot some stuff because I this is just a video we get out here randomly I don't have any notes or anything like that but if you like the video please like subscribe please help a girl Oklahoma shelters and remember II recycle also remember to support me on patreon YouTube is basically demonetized my entire channel so all the patron money goes to ammunition it goes to guns for review I don't keep any of it all goes to the channel I super appreciate that I super appreciate your support thank you for watching what is this baller-ass recoil control you then I'll show ya [Music] [Applause] [Applause] you

Channel: Honest Outlaw

Views: 935,693

Rating: 4.9226179 out of 5

Keywords: ar15, ar-15, ar 15, best, best ar-15, best ar15, top 5, top 5 ar15s, top 5 ar-15, best rifle, worst rifle, worst ar15, cheap, cheap ar15, budget, budget ar15, first ar15, buying tips, ar15 tips, accuracy, reliability, mud test, mlok, keymod, bcm, colt, sig sauer, ruger, mk18, hk, hk 416, daniel defense, ati, radical firearms, v seven, 2a armament, aimpoint, trijicon, acog, 1-6, best 1-6, 1-8 scope, lantac dragon

Id: h_ugTm2wAaY

Length: 21min 31sec (1291 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 27 2019