Franklin Armory: keeping the anti-gun Fascists nervous
Last year Franklin Armory announced The Reformation, an AR that is neither a rifle nor a shotgun, therefore it is immune to the barrel length laws governing either. So they can sell you an 11.5" Reformation AR in 5.56 or 300 Blk on a plain 'ol 4473; no Form 4, no $200 NFA tax and no 6-month processing period.
Anyway, the Reformation finally went on sale a couple of weeks ago. And now they're teasing a new AR-like pstol cartridge platform that isn't semi-automatic. Yeah, it's even weirder than the Reformation, and just as brilliant. I'll get to that in a bit.
The reason the Reformation isn't a rifle is the rifling is straight. Yes, the barrel is rifled but the groves don't spiral so neither do they impart any spin on the bullet. Which makes it fail to meet the BATF's threshold for a rifle.
So you're thinking accuracy must be for shit, right? Franklin Armory claims that even with no spin it will shoot 3.5" groups at 100 yards. Which isn't minute-of-prairie-dog but they think it's adequate for home defense. I'm inclined to agree. I can't find the reference but I seem to recall that DoD's standard for accuracy for the M4 carbine is either 3 or 4 inches at 100 meters. So in that light, 3.5 inches at 100 yards (91.5 meters) doesn't seem to shabby. But they're proprietary barrels and apparently an extremely tight bore is part of the reason.
Franklin even freely admits the bullets are tumbling before they get to 100 yards, they just happen to also be fairly consistent about their path of flight. My primary worry about a short barrel .223 is fragmentation. Bullets don't fragment if they don't tumble first but hell, these bullets are already tumbling. They must have external ballistics for shit but terminal ballistics from hell!
When they announced the Reformation, the BATF had said it wasn't a shotgun either but they've since altered their ruling ...slightly. The 1934 NFA states that a shotgun has to fire a shotgun shell so nothing firing a rifle cartridge qualifies. However, there's no such stipulation in the 1968 GCA, so GCA says it is a shotgun and NFA says it isn't. NFA is the one that makes you fill out a Form 4 and pay a $200 tax, so it isn't an NFA shotgun, therefore it is immune from the NFA's barrel length limits. But because it is a GCA shotgun, you still have to file a BATFE Form 5320.20 to notify ATF of your intentions to transport the device across a state line.
Ain't that some shit. It also means that if they do choose to build it in other cartridges, you'll probably never see one chambered in a .45 caliber because then you might be able to shoot a .410 shell in it.
And they're behind in development but they are working on fin-stabilized ammunition that promises better external ballistics (and it will drive police forensics bat-shit because there's no rifling engravings on the projectile) , so I'm eager to see how that works out. The standard 7.5" Reformation (also available in 11.5") is $1180 and with an FA binary trigger it's $1410.
But the new news, and what prompted me to post this, is that Franklin Armory just in the last couple of days has teased a non-semi-automatic AR-like platform called the Providence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XS1fMBRJms
What it is, is a double-action-only, magazine-fed rifle that lacks a semi-auto's self-cocking and self-loading functions. The pull of the trigger cocks it and the release of the bolt (which occurs only at the end of the trigger-activated cocking action) loads it. So you can't call it semi-auto, which means it's eligible for sale in places where semi-autos are forbidden.
Watch the video in slo-mo and you can see that the bolt starts moving rearward the instant he starts pulling the trigger. When he hits the trigger's rearward travel stop, the bolt (which from that position is under spring tension) is released. The compressed spring drives it forward, it strips fresh a round out of the magazine, everything slams into battery, the firing pin breaks the primer ...and gun go BANG! It's oddly similar to firing from an open bolt except the bolt comes to rest in battery.
http://i67.tinypic.com/bj629v.jpg
From the photos it looks like they run on Glock mags, probably 9mm. Granted that's some seriously long trigger pull, closer to Glock than to Geissele, but this whole damn gizmo goes to what I keep saying about the hoplophobes. They can't win because they're content with knowing sweet fuck all about firearms, yet they still naïvely expect their ineptly-written anti-gun laws to be effective. And guys like Franklin Armory keep dancing rings around them. As I posted almost a month ago, a company called Lord Rockwell already had a bump-fire stock that skirts Trump's ban (the Not A Bumpstock stock) in production before the ban was signed but they didn't put them on sale until afterward so the ban couldn't be re-written for their benefit.
I don't lust after a Providence AR but it's good to know the people at Franklin Armory are doing God's own work and giving Nancy Pelosilly ulcers, not to mention keeping options open for us gun guys in case some day the hoplohpobes win.
