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  • 2002-07-08 (xsd:date)
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  • Were the M-16 Rifles Used During the Vietnam War Made by Mattel? (en)
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  • The M-16, a rapid-fire, 5.56 mm assault rifle carried by thousands of American soldiers during the Vietnam War, grew out of efforts to develop a replacement for the standard M-1 Carbine used during World War II. The M-16 (originally designed by Eugene Stoner of Armalite as the AR-15) was constructed using plastics and alloys and was a much smaller and lighter weapon than its predecessors, one that fit in with the developing Vietnam-era strategy of less emphasis on long-range accuracy in favor of more easily-carried weapons with rapid rates of fire. Hundreds of thousands of M-16s were supplied to U.S. troops in the mid-1960s as US Army made the M-16 their standard rifle: Example: [Morgan and Tucker, 1987] However, the M-16, manufactured by the Colt Firearms Corporation (who bought the rights from Armalite in 1959), soon developed a reputation for unreliability, frequently jamming and fouling (especially when not kept clean, a next-to-impossible task in the dust and mud of Vietnam battlefields). Problems with the M-16 eventually achieved such prominence that a congressional inquiry was ordered, resulting in design changes, additional troop training, and other modifications that ameliorated many of the reliability issues U.S. troops were experiencing with the weapon: To the troops in the field, the original M-16 was new, it was small, it was light, it was made of plastic rather than wood, and it often performed poorly to boot. It was no surprise that many of them started expressing their dissatisfaction by referring to it derisively as a cheaply-made toy, and that they associated it with the most prominent toy company of the time: Mattel, the Hawthorne, California, toy manufacturer famous for introducing the Barbie doll to the world: The Mattel legend was undoubtedly fed by the fact that Mattel really did sell an M-16 Marauder toy gun in the mid-1960s, a quite good reproduction of the actual weapon, complete with realistic sound effects: The sardonic joke about problem-plagued M-16s being toys morphed into a legend about their really having been produced by a toy company, with proof offered in the additional detail of soldier's spotting M-16 handgrips embossed with the Mattel logo. The redesign that improved the M-16's reliability was then attributed to a switch in manufacturers (to a real gun company) prompted by soldier complaints. (en)
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