Bottom line for me, I trust my life to non piston guns.
Because they have inherent flaws or you just have not owned any? I am a novice trying to determine if I even want to own a black gun. I have been looking at the IWRC R.E.P.R.. It's a 308 piston gun.
I have fired several AR's of the impingement design and they were incredibly accurate at 100 yards, open sighted, even with me behind them.
Consider the fact that while �technically� on paper, the gas piston designs �should� be better, they are NOT proven in military service. Any student of military arms can tell you that most every military rifle �should� have worked right off the bat, but most every major military rifle ever made has had issues once they were pressed into military service; issues no one foresaw before military service. And those issues are almost always NOT issues of design, but of materials and manufacture. There have been oodles of changes in materials and manufacturing techniques to the M16 series rifles, but almost no overall design changes (functionally). The M14 had some significant heat treating and metallurgical issues. Same as the FAL. The M1 Garand had minor design related issues that became serious functioning issues. The G3 had several teething problems. Yet all of these rifles went on to have extremely distinguished service careers.
So while people may be oh-so proud of their gas piston AR�s, consider two things:
The AR was NOT designed for a piston system. Any piston system AR is a work-around. Consider just one little thing, the gas piston rod pushes against an area that was never intended to drive the bolt. The AR bolt was DESIGNED to be propelled from within, not a-top of.
No gas piston AR has significant in the field time. The H&K 416 has had some limited time in the field with special ops. But that�s limited time, and special ops. To me it�s not proven until it�s years in the field, in the hands of poorly trained grunts.
