One day during my lunch break, I walked into my favorite Texas gun store, pointed at a rifle that I had wanted for awhile, swiped my card, and walked out with it under my arm. That was the type of thing you could do in Texas with a concealed carry permit and an hour-long lunch break. I may have been a little bit late making it back to the office as I had to drop the rifle off at home before heading back on base, but I was pretty excited with the Springfield Armory M1A SOCOM II that I had just purchased.
That was the beginning phase of my boredom with “modern” rifles, such as the AR-15. By that point in time, they had become just too ubiquitous, too common place. Pretty much everyone had one at the range, and I think I had built at least ten of them by then. It was time for a change, and I looked to the past.
The M1A is a slightly updated version of the M14, which was a short-lived service rifle for the U.S. Military. Borrowing heavily from the M1 Garand of World War II fame, the M14 entered service after the Korean War and preceded the M16 that is still in service today. It can be a contentious rifle, as many firearms historians consider it to be a pointless rifle and the adoption of one of its competitors, the FN FAL, would have been a wiser choice. Whether or not that is true, the past is in the past, and the M1A SOCOM II that I picked up that afternoon was something that I had wanted for a couple years.
In fact, that particular rifle had been on the gun store shelf for months. I had first noticed it among the row of M1As in various configurations. The stubby rifle with a MultiCam stock drew my eye, and I knew I wanted that rifle. I just didn’t have the money for it at the time. As luck would have it, a few months after I first found the rifle, the Air Force sent me to Qatar for a bit, and I saved up enough money to buy the M1A when I came back.
This isn’t the most practical rifle. It’s heavy, the magazines are expensive and can be finicky, accuracy isn’t the best, the safety is in a funky spot, and mounting an optic requires more effort than pretty much anything else I’ve ever worked on. It definitely is not a rifle for beginners. So what’s so great about it?
For me, it just looks rad. The classic stock lines with a modern, MultiCam spin blend the present with the past. It is heavy, true, but it is also handy, and swings pretty well. It might not be the most accurate, but I was able to use it to take Whitetail Deer at 150 yards without a problem. The muzzle break at the end of the 16 inch barrel tames the recoil of the .308 Winchester/7.62mm NATO very well, making follow up shots easy enough.
Don’t get me wrong, this rifle recoils much heavier than many of the more modern .308 Winchester rifles out there, but it doesn’t slap the shooter in the face like Yugo AKs tend to do. It is more of a heavy push back into the shoulder. Manageable, but by no means is the recoil nonexistent.
When I first took the rifle to the range, I didn’t have an optic on it. This was all fine and dandy for a flat range that only extended to 200 yards. The front sight is a wide, glowing blade that is clearly intended for closer ranges, but making hits on steel silhouettes at the end of the shooting range was easy enough. Even so, I wanted to use the handy .308 for deer hunting in West Texas. On the ranch we were hunting on shots could be further than 200 yards, and the deer deserved a higher degree of precision than the tritium-filled iron sights could give.
The M1A SOCOM II comes with a small section of rail far forward on the upper handguard, where one could mount a red-dot or holographic optic. I don’t like to put optics that far forward, it feels unnatural to me, so I purchased an optic mounting platform to mount to the receiver of the stubby rifle. Unfortunately, this placed the 2-7x Redfield scope too high, requiring a “chin-weld” instead of a proper cheek-weld on the stock.
It worked well enough, and during the last weekend of the Texas firearms deer season, a season that is set aside for culling surplus does and spike bucks, I was able to harvest two animals from around 200 yards.
When I moved to California for school, I took the M1A with me as it wasn’t as hamstrung by the rules and regulations the government of that particular state. However, with the cost of ammunition, and the lack of extended distances to shoot at the local range, I pulled the magnified optic off and put it on my 10/22. We were able to use the 10/22 on the steel targets at the local range, which Jenny really enjoyed shooting.
The M1A is not necessarily regarded as the “best” rifle in its class, but it fills a particular niche in my collection. The ammo hits hard, recoils heavy, and spits a fireball out of the muzzle break on the end of the short barrel. The rifle is a mashup of past and present, with an action that entered service in the 1930’s, and a stock dripped in camouflage that was developed for the GWOT. Some think the rifle is pointless, a mistake of U.S. Military small arms procurement. For me, I just like it.
What the M1A showed me was that while the AR15 and other .223/5.56 NATO rifles are a blast to shoot and highly practical, old “warhorse” battle rifles in .308/7.62 NATO have an allure that only heavy metal can give.