Is the M14 Rifle Obsolete?

[Music] hey guys it's james with tfb tv and we are at thunder ranch for the third time in tfb tv history which is always exciting you guys know i love coming out here hanging out with clint and heidi and getting some top quality instruction last time we were here my boys at 511 sponsored it this year we've got a new sponsor and it is damn it we got to reshoot the video i forgot who the who's right springfield the gun company springfield armory is the sponsor okay i mean it isn't like they they sent an m1a or anything right ryan they right [Music] my name is james reeves and i hate obsolete guns including the m14 but i spoke with the guys at springfield armory and they asked me to give this rifle a second chance they sent tfb-tv a modernized m14 that is the m1a loaded model which has a 22-inch national match air gauge premium stainless barrel a composite adjustable stock with six o'clock picatinny rail for mounting a bipod a two-stage national match trigger with a four and a half pound pull and match sights that work with the included optics mount silencer shop also sent a surefire socom 762-rc2 for us to use on this rifle as well as a little tool you need to remove the front sight and the muzzle device in order to get this can on this gun it's a little bit tricky but it's not that hard if you have the right tool oh up up it's actually moving dude i might actually get this shouldn't be this complicated though let's i mean let's be real with ourselves here maybe people were at that dumb in the 50s dude this is terrible but i think we're golden oh [ __ ] warning if you are an m14 purist turn this video off right now because this rifle came chambered in 6.5 creedmoor a modern cartridge which gently pounds the 308 cartridge in virtually every important metric i brought this m1a to thunder ranch's adam brown range for some long distance shooting but more importantly i spoke with three great veterans who have actual trigger time behind this much loved and much hated platform we spoke with clint smith a vietnam vet die hard marine the lead instructor at thunder ranch he needs no introduction clint qualified on this rifle when he was just a teenager we also spoke with barry duke pro shooter also a marine who showed us his own mark 14 ebr which is another modernized m14 variant finally we talked to best-selling author and navy seal sniper jack carr who told us what the m14 can do in a capable sniper's hands and while these men will tell us many of the things that make this gun great there are some not so great features as well so today on tfb tv we ask is the m14 obsolete well the military certainly thinks so the m14 rifle is the shortest serving rifle in u.s military history it became the standard issue rifle for the us military in 1959 replacing the m1 garand until itself being replaced not even 10 years later by the m16 in 1968. although not standard issue the m14 rifle does remain in service to an extent the mark 14 evr again which barry duke is going to show us in a moment the m21 and the m25 are all built around the m14 and are issued primarily as sniper or designated marksman rifles although these last vestiges are themselves being replaced by more high-tech rifles the m14 was replaced by the m16 with much political fanfare and bureaucratic infighting a declassified 1968 report from the department of the army that recommended the m16 over the m14 after a lengthy series of grueling tests and analysis of data pulled from vietnam about the performance of both guns the report freely admits that a decision to adopt the m16 was surrounded in controversy the report says that the m14 was only a minor improvement over the m1 grand that it replaced in that it was functionally worthless in full auto and three times in just one page of the introduction to the report the army points out the biggest weakness of the m14 weight it states that the decision to go with the 308 is a standard round quote all but precluded the development of a truly lightweight weapon leading to a gun that quote did not weigh less than the grand and that was too heavy and too long to replace the m2 carbine the m16 performed well relative to the m14 igniting the controversy between proponents of a smaller lighter rifle and guardians of the big bore in particular the m16 while less powerful than the m14 was seen as an effective cartridge out to 500 meters at a much lighter weight and while at the time of testing the m14 was more reliable with just less than one stoppage for every thousand rounds during testing the margins were thin the early m16 only averaged one stoppage more per 2 000 rounds over the more mature m14 design clint smith is no stranger to either platform and he was glad to discuss the pros and cons of the m14 with us explain to me why this isn't an outdated piece of judge the deal with it is it's not a question of declining like in the sense of outdated like you know like oh it's a conestoga wagon compared to the space shuttle that's not the point what we're trying to do is take a rifle that's the shortest service life rifle of any american martial arm okay and it basically was unplugged uh that said you know replaced by the m16 slash m4 or whatever the name is it for this week whatever part of the biggest criteria with this rifle going under if you know the history of it from a tactical standpoint in the war on terror is it was very hard to make something that was carriable weight wise okay in this platform remember that this rifle the foundation of this rifle not the one you're trying to use right here but the foundation of the rifle was basically designed after korea to replace the m1 garand and the bar so they wanted to make a gun to replace two to replace the original squad automatic weapon the bar with this this gun is atrocious in full auto they tried all kinds of things pistol grips heavy barrels and then a it's a rifle it's not a machine gun and so like and now in this configuration it has issues in the sense that the gun is still relatively heavy i shot this rifle i showed you actually my logbook from boot camp i shot the rifle i got one you know i've had one when i did it i it only required two clicks of change the gun is like rock solid and it's not rock solid for me anymore okay one i'm 71. my eyes aren't what they were when i was 21 or 19 okay so i don't see iron sights as well so we need to put an optic on it weight that said because it's a heavy gun it shoots through [ __ ] so like when people go like well you want to go if you're fighting in an urban environment and you're not trucking up the side of a mountain i don't know that it would necessarily be a bad choice it has a suppressor it has a scope but the gun continues to get heavier and heavier and heavier so two things one i don't see the sights as well two i don't like carrying heavy [ __ ] anymore okay three if i had one which i have 308 okay i like him because if i need to shoot through something that will the girl that weighs 110 pounds she doesn't need that she needs a rifle that she can carry a couple magazines for manny's two kids okay and her this rodeo down the hallway so she doesn't need a heavy gun so the problem with these is always the same thing it's always been that any time you change it from the standard infantry rifle then you make the gun heavier you got a can on the end man you just added a pound and a half or scandium titanium on unobtainium i don't give a [ __ ] you're hanging on the end it's going to make the gun nose heavy dude this thing's way too heavy can we try it and so like you have like basically what i would call a relatively mature grown man going like the guns heavy well go to the gym or take the can off and or if you put the can on then go to the gym because you're going to have to hold the weight you know the redeeming bag of the gun in its standard configuration it was an awesome gun it was very accurate we shot him okay we shot the 500 yards like you know when i was and do you know 50 years ago i was in the marine corps but the guns are really accurate i mean what's really accurate mean well it's a damage or a minute gun and even if it's two who cares at 500 yards that's 10 inches that's not 10 inches across there big boy he just got drilled this is a nice job by the way i mean this is a nice setup yeah this is springfield the this is how i mean of course without the all the accessories and [ __ ] but i mean the way it otherwise comes configured without the optic the bipod the silencer right that's how it comes from the factory so i actually was kind of impressed this isn't like yeah i i don't think you're gonna have a problem with it um like i said the big thing will be to load the bipod you really need to stay behind the gun because there is reciprocation in this when the gun fires with the bolt gun there's no reciprocation right there's no movement the gun basically a solid is going to be up until you pull the trigger then you're unloaded then you got to reload it which is the redeeming valve this [ __ ] it will load itself and then so you know if you go like hey what about zero to 500 yards it ought to be a hammer especially on multiple threats okay you want to shoot true yeah a thousand yards 900 yards okay then you know now you're talking coriolis affects spin drift curve of the earth and somebody's like pet dog guy i mean whatever excuses they come up with you know to miss the target this is a tool for a relatively specific job we have multiple targets i put them at 300 you're gonna own them you're gonna eat them up okay so why why wouldn't i just run an ar-10 instead of this because they generally don't work okay and i got the xm 177 okay but like you know they're trying to replace that with a scar i'm not sure that's a good replacement okay you know i mean if you're trying to do surgical work then you know the deal with it is this the redeeming value of this is it just basically has the bolt okay moving okay got it the problem with the r10 is it has two pins that hold it together that hold the trigger okay that's in the lower that moves that's attached to an upper with the bolt is moving in other words there's a lot of extra stuff a good rifle good tool but like you said if i go like hey take this rifle hump it to the top of the hill you know oh [ __ ] that's really big hill clint right it's going to be heavy the platform it met criteria i mean they put a 20 round magazine on it that took care of the m black loader um the bar was 20 round it was in a nato cartridge so it isn't so much that it's like bad or good as much as it's i think people don't understand the [ __ ] out of history anymore they just go oh that sucks i don't think it's always james about like beating [ __ ] up why don't we understand where it comes from and what it serves and you know i appreciate the opportunity to get input into it because like you know 50 years ago this is the rifle i qualified on you know i mean it was like i got it and it didn't look anything like this so to get another perspective on the issue we also talked to barry duke vice president of suppressors for surefire an accomplished tournament shooter and president of duke defense what are some drawbacks like what's good or bad about it and finally what you guys are sending with me to thunder ranch tell us who you are hi i'm barry duke i'm vice president suppressors and weapons surefire and here i'm going to go uh over some of the pros and cons of the m14 m1a in civilian form this is a springfield armory uh scout in a sage ebr chassis so basically uh the pretty much the original configuration that socom came up with for the mark 14. the mechanical advantages of this stock are actually really cool because the way a normal m14 goes together right right up here behind the gas system the stock actually clips in and then the trigger guard holds it together so you got tension on your barrel and your action kind of pulling it this way and then the pistons on the bottom kind of doing the opposite when you fire which from a good solid accurate rifle uh you know i go back a few years but when i was shooting high power rifle matches in the marine corps they'd give us a fancy m4 custom m1a the or m14 that the 2112s had made in quantico and super accurate great rifles when you get into uh suppressing them the sage stock actually has some advantages because there's a block inside here that's pressed onto the barrel so this setup is uh a lot more rigid than a normal m14 stock is and where that comes in is remember i was saying about the different tensions and this has a fairly thin barrel so it's a little under 600 thou with the threat at the muzzle so compared to like an ar platform uh significantly lighter uh you hang a suppressor on it uh with this stock i've seen between two and six minutes of shift we now keep in mind that all of our suppressors are test-fired on basically a fixtured sniper rifle for lack of a better way to describe it and a minute of angle angles the fail point so taking m14s m1as putting suppressors on them i've seen up to eight minutes of shift now on that one that went eight minutes the accuracy got better and it was completely repeatable like take the suppressor off clean the gun put the suppressor back on always went back to exactly the same spot but now as the shooter is the guy working the rifle you got two complete separate zeros that you got to work with so if you have a scope on your rifle you got turrets you know you could definitely just dial in if you had a reticle like a horse or something it wouldn't really affect you that much but if you had an aim point you're using it for you know closer in work uh you'd have to set up your rifle to be 100 suppressed or 100 unsuppressed um this uh socom 762rc2 uh when you get a suppressor it's a balance of what you do in this case i didn't make this suppressor as absolute quiet i made it bomb proof with a reasonable amount of back pressure because to get more sound out of it i would have ended up having higher back pressure that's going to really matter with you on an m14 because that ejection port is huge which is great for getting the rounds out of it but at the same time your face is right behind it and you don't want a bunch of extra gas pressure coming back if you end up with suppressors or super high back pressure i know guys that have gone in and welded up the piston hole and redrilled it super small but now you have a gun that only functions suppressed doesn't function unsuppressed unless you change parts between different samples of one of the ebrs we had in because we actually won the suppressor contract with our fa 762k which was the grandfather to socom 762rc2 uh for this rifle and i was kind of proud about winning that overall great rifles highly reliable back when high power shooters were still shooting m14s before the m16 had come in and dominated uh i watched uh marine corps rifle team walk up and walk away winning a thousand yard match with ironsided m14s and they were beating guys with bolt-action rifles and scopes on them finally we spoke with jack carr new york times best-selling author and navy seal sniper at the time jack and i were chatting the wind and the rain were blowing so hard that the audio is hardly usable but jack did praise the platform for its accuracy and told us that even with iron sights the m14 can make hits out to impressive distances if we were going to bet 20 bucks where's even money for you with iron sights in an m14 and how far are we going what are we doing you're telling me how far how far out is it 50 50 for uh for jack card navy seal sniper what's a 50 50 shot with an m14 on sights pretty far i mean uh 800 let's say oh 800 even with the ice holy crap i spent a day on the adam brown range at thunder ranch shooting the m1a loaded and as soon as i stepped off the line i fired up the camera and recorded my observations is the m14 or the m1a a viable precision rifle well if you ask the vice president of silencers at surefire he's going to say yes if you ask clint smith who shot one of these in vietnam he's going to say yes if you ask a navy seal sniper jack carr he's going to say yes this is a viable precision rifle now taryn butler did not like the m1a or the m14 he thought it was too heavy he was trying to shoot it off hand well it was great in the vietnam whatever but it's just too gonzoey it's just clunky it's just like a big meat lover it's like having brock lesnar run like the 100 yard dash that has a purpose for something else and i got to tell you we put about 100 rounds through this rifle at the first day of the counter sniper course here at thunder ranch and it was awesome so shooting great with just regular off-the-shelf ammo once we got the thing zeroed and we were using the maven rs4 scope i had never heard of maven but when they heard that i was doing this video they volunteered to send their scope in and it was pretty freaking good it's made in japan i think it was a 5 to 30 x this is a 5 to 30 x we're going to do a separate video on this so i'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on it but for being a 30x it's a a pretty compact optic and the glass has been very clear but i was still pretty impressed with it it even has an illuminated reticle which makes a huge difference you can do red or green that was really cool because it would really stand out whenever you were shooting but back to the m14 so we get the scope mounted on there again we're just absolutely thumping everything from 100 to 500 yards with this rifle and then all of a sudden it would throw a fly so that was the m1a not so hot 200 yards it's like [ __ ] you know is it the silencer is it the action is the gun just unreliable what's the problem so we bring it back to clint smith's shop and mike who is not only a very good looking man but a talented gunsmith here at thunder ranch took the thing apart looked at it and said you know what it is man your scope mount is absolutely busted he said that the screw holding the scope mount to the receiver was a little bit loose so he goes to tighten it to proper torque specifications it just spins free and he's like [ __ ] this thing's stripped so whoever put it in uh stripped it and there wasn't enough tension to keep the mouse screw was cracking and breaking and that's not nobody's fault other than metal energy but it was breaking while you're shooting because that's when the inconsistencies started that makes sense yeah so all it took was under i would say it took probably 30 to 40 inch pounds to finish it off but it was already not under any tension and that's why we were getting inconsistencies funniest thing about that is clint said hey what was wrong with your scope mount on that m14 and i said well clint turns out and it's so funny he said don't tell me the screw holding the mount to the receiver was stripped i was like yeah and he's like yeah there's got to be some better way to do that so what are the pros of the m1a or the m14 it shoots very easily because it's so damn heavy whenever you shoot the thing especially in 6.5 creedmoor which is the model i was using you feel very little recoil so it was easy to make multiple hits out here at the brown range at thunder ranch they have four targets that are all next to each other and they're like ip6 sized targets that are on a swing they call them the four horsemen and it's four different colored guys that are maybe like a few feet from each other at about 200 yards so you could absolutely smash almost as fast as you could pull the trigger did you get that yep once you stood up the thing was so damn heavy that it's a true chore to carry this thing or to shoot it off hand versus on the dirt a loaded model that i used had an incredible trigger and had a fantastic stock the ergonomics were excellent the adjustable stock was great you didn't need tools to adjust it and it's just a cool looking gun so does the m14 still work as a precision rifle yeah yeah it does are there perhaps better options i would say probably it is a piston gun which is nice it is reliable it is accurate but again heavy as heck and i'm pretty sure you could at this point get just as good performance out of an ar or something that's a little bit lighter weight but some people are going to just want the m14 or the m1a for either nostalgia purposes or they want a heavy semi-automatic rifle so i decided to be a good sport i brought a gun out here to thunder ranch i didn't even like and i still don't really like it all that much but i learned a lot making this video and i hope you guys learned a lot this is a capable platform unfortunately there's an issue with mine that needs to be fixed but when it was working it was on and it was actually pretty freaking fun guys thanks a ton as usual for watching if you want to support us on patreon or subscribe star we'd really appreciate it we give away four guns a month on patreon and subscribe star we also give away three blue alpha gear belts to patreon and subscribe star members so go there and sign up bear in mind that our drawings have nothing whatsoever to do with youtube thank you to ventura munitions for sending the ammo and thank you to top gun supply your online shooting sports superstore they're the guys who donate the prizes to our raffle every month as well but most of all thank you all for [Music] watching [Music] foreign

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Views: 305,634

Rating: 4.9211669 out of 5

Keywords: tfb, tfb tv, tfbtv, m14, m14 rifle, m1a, rifle, springfield, 7.62, 308, .308, military, army, armory, garand, nato, battle rifle, vietnam, springfield armory, forgotten weapons, m14 ebr, modern warfare, cod, Taran Tactical, taran tactical, taran tactical innovations, john wick, taran butler, glock, keanu reeves, james reeves, james tfb, Clint Smith, Thunder Ranch, Jack Carr, Navy SEAL, Dueck, Surefire, urban rifle, self defense, the firearm blog, gun vids, tactical, m1, call of duty

Id: r2XQP9MoT3o

Length: 23min 5sec (1385 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/GunFunZS]

Tfb is obsolete.

[u/leto78]

The M14 is obsolete. It was the worst of the 7.62 NATO rifles and it was so bad that it led to the quick adoption of the M16.

On the other hand, the FN FAL and the HK G3 were so good that it have not been completely replaced.

The only modern usage of the M14 was for accurized versions for DMR, but it has been replaced by the M110.

[u/moviemoocher]

well all projectile based weapons are when we have sharks with fricken lazer beams

[u/eascrima]

Yes

[u/TacTurtle]

The AR should be obsolete, it is a 6 decade old design. Fight me.