Did I buy the wrong AR15?
[su_heading size=”30″]Are you like this guy?[/su_heading]
Or, are you with that crowd that is still sitting on the fence to buy an AR? Or, maybe you decided that you wanted to invest in one but not sure of which brand? Or, you did get one but still not sure if you got the right AR15?
Well, personally as an editor I can’t tell you which on the market is the best, even though I spent over 20 years carrying the military version of an AR and I do appreciate a good piece of machinery. So we’ll let this Youtuber from Wrangler Star explain his reasoning for going with a DDM4V7, yeh its a Daniel Defense brand. Please chime in and let us know if you’re an AR owner and why/how did you choose the AR that you have.
[su_heading size=”30″]Video Transcription[/su_heading]
If you followed the channel for any length of time, you all know that I have been on the quest for the perfect AR15. Well, the perfect AR15 for me. My goodness, it has been a hard, hard decision. Now I’ve had an AR15 that I’ve built, years and years ago, that I’ve always been unhappy with. I’m not an armorer, I was not an expert at the time when I built it, I didn’t know a lot when I specced everything out, and it has not been reliable. And the thing about it that’s bothered me the most, as it sat in the gun cabinet all of those years, being my primary home-defense weapon: Um, I haven’t trusted it. I have not trusted it and I have been uneasy about it ever since I’ve owned it. I’ve wanted a high-quality AR15 that I could completely rely upon, that I could– would make me sleep well at night.
So, started digging in, and man oh man is there a lot of experts, AR15 experts, on the internet. And on the forums. I am not one of them, but I wanted to be informed, I wanted to buy the right one, I wanted to make sure that it was going to be the perfect gun for me. I narrowed it down between many, you know there’s great resources out there, I watched videos from Nuttin Fancy, I watched videos from Hickok45, Iraqwatveteran, if I’m leaving you out, HOSSUSMC, there’s so much good information out there; so much bad information out there. What I kinda narrowed it down to was, of course, the colt. The 6920, the M4, the classic military version- ‘mil spec’ if you want to call it- and also the new Ruger was good, I looked at that one, the M&P was good, I looked at that, Daniel Defense of course, TangoDown, RueTactical, so many of them. But I finally decided.
Can you guess which one I went with?
I’ll show you here. I went with the DanielDefense DDM4V7 AR15. And I am stoked. you know, one of the couple of the turning points was, I still wasn’t decided when I went to the gunshop, they had everything that I wanted there, and they even had this one in stock. I knew they had it, I had seen it there before. But I watched NuttinFancy’s review on it, I watched Hickok45, this is what he bought for himself. NuttinFancy bought the very same gun for himself. And man, they are expensive. It’s hard to justify, you know, I could have had almost two of the discount colts, or the Ruger, or the M&P for the price of one of these. Man that’s a tough one, that’s a tough one when you’re sitting there thinking ‘man I could have TWO ARs for the price of one Daniel Defense, but in the end– do I need two? I already have two– in the end, this is he one that I wanted that puts my mind at ease at nighttime.
So I don’t know, there’s a lot of guys that have a lot more experience with these than I do, and I’m not an expert, but I’ll tell you kinda what it is I like about it. So Daniel Defense, I mean, they make some of the finest, you know, some would even argue kind of going beyond military specifications in quality. As Hickok said, it’s hard to find someone that has anything bad to say about Daniel Defense. They’ve been making ARs for what, a decade now? And they just ooze quality and attention to detail. I mean, they are just wonderful for a mid-range– I guess you would probably call this a mid-to-upper range or something– but what you have is you have that their own proprietary stock, which is no-rattle, mil-spec tube, buffer tube, staked castle nuts, you’ve got M16 Bolt Carrier group, you’ve got proprietary handle, you’ve got enlarged kind of weld magazine well, a wonderful rail attachment system, all M-lock, chrome-lined barrel, cold hammer forged, I mean the list just goes on and on and on, it’s just quality, quality, quality. And I’d actually kind of decided when I was– as I was pulling into the parking lot. ‘Ok, I’m gonna buy two colts, and I’m done’. But when I put the colt next to it, and I spent an hour there, I made the poor guy’s life merable, just having my hands on it, feeling it, looking at it, looking at everything, this just was head and shoulders above. Fit and finish, the quality, just the feel of it, it is, it’s wonderful. It’s absolutely wonderful.
One thing of course, you know, that everyone wants to do, is modify their guns when they get them. Personalize it, you know? Make it your own. And I get that. What am I going to do to mine? I’m not gonna do hardly anything. I’m gonna put a trigger in it. I’ve got a RockRiver stage 2 trigger that I have on my other one that I really like, the trigger on this is not great. It’s just your typical trigger. I do not like it. I’ve been used to shooting a nice trigger, and this is not it. That’s it. That’s all I’m going to do on it. I’m gonna put an EoTech on it, um… a sling? I’m not gonna go on and mess it up. I am– that’s what you do when you’re younger, you know? You modify your cars and you start changing everything, you think that you know better than the engineers who actually build these things, and what I’ve learned is, I don’t. I’m just doing things to cut down reliability or– I’m gonna leave it alone. It is perfect as it is. That’s why you pay the extra money to buy something like this, is because there’s very little that needs to be done with it. So, just couldn’t be happier with it. The Daniel Defense, they just make wonderful guns. I would buy another one, I’ve already looked into which one I want next, you know, down the road, but um– I’ll do– I don’t know, this is not a gun channel, I don’t know if I’m going to be doing any shooting with it, or do much further with it, but I know there was a lot of questions, because I already talked about it, and everybody knew I was looking for one, but man, lightweight. What is it, six-point-two pounds? You know, without the magazine on it. But isn’t that cool? Absolutely love it.
So, now the next question is going to be on the optic. I want magnification, because, where I live, there’s predators and pests, long shot. Four-hundred meters from the house. That’s how far away you could shoot. So I want something, growing up in a hunting family, I never hunted, my grandfather never hunted with any more than a four-power scope. And we hunted eastern Oregon for Rocky-mountain roosevelt elk, and many of those shots were in excess of three-hundred, four-hundred yards. Never once did we ever use anything more than a four-power scope. I’m comfortable with that. Three-power, four-power is fine. So, what optic do I want to put on here? I’m looking at the magnifier, the oetech magnifier, since I’ve already got the eotech I’ve got half the investment done, I’m looking at, you know, there’s the Vcog, or do I step up and get one of those, a variable Vcog, there’s some new sights from Leupold, those are very interesting. Oh, I’m gonna put sights on it. So I’m gonna put co-witnessing sights. I’ll probably just throw Mbus on there, maybe Mbus pros. We’ll see. So it’s gonna kinda depend on what optic I use. You know, how that– where it’s gonna fit. So, still fleshing that all out. So give me your take on which AR you bought and why; if you have one of these, let me know in the comments what you think about it, give me some optic options. You know I know eotech has had some bad press and some issues lately, I’ve read about that, I’m aware of that, and the variations in temperature, and losing zero, you know, that’s something to consider too, but I don’t know. I’m not the expert. But this is what I chose, this is what was best for me, I’m not saying this is the best one in the world, it just was the one that I wanted and the one that was the best fit for me. There’s a lot of great ones out there. But this I think is among the top-tier. So, that’s it. Sharing that with you. So thanks for watching, and we’ll see you guys on the next video.
Sources: Wrangler Star Youtube