There was no AK division at HAH. He was one of maybe two or three shooters with an AK. And I'd bet they did a lot worse than he did - and he was using a rifle that's mechanical accuracy severely harmed his ability to compete.
As Phagan pointed out: During the close portions he (an experienced action competitor who has constantly and consistently run similar rifles and handguns for years) and Kasarda (a guy who has admitted on camera that he can't shoot as often as he'd like and his shooting ability has suffered as a result, and he frequently runs weird and unusual guns) were neck-and-neck. Once the distances increased, Phagan was able to blow Kasarda out of the water. And this is with Kasarda running an AK set-up to be used in multigun competition.
Kasarda's numbers from HAH2017 were established using a rifle intended to use lightweight, modern materials, to give a lightweight, practical, reliable rifle. Not a competition rifle, not a military rifle, but a defensive rifle made with advanced materials: Carbon fiber handguard, polymer lower, lighter-than-pencil barrel, flash hider. No brake, no tuning for minimal recoil, no LPVO (unlike the AK which had all of these things). Just a red dot. Which was mentioned as being less than ideal for the long-range targets at HAH.
The service life of the AK as a primary service weapon for a superpower ended not long after the 1980s: 26 December 1991. Russia ceased to be a superpower when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Beretta ARX-160
CZ 805/805 BREN
Colt Canada C8
FN Herstal SCAR-L
Steyr AUG A3
XTEK/SiG Sauer MCX or 516?
H&K HK416
LMT
That's two DI ARs. Everything else is a short-stroke piston. Even if the Steyr submission was their fifteen-pound HK416 knock-off. SiG is unlikely to have submitted the M400, because that's not their premier weapon system and it's frankly a pricepoint gun, something to sell to places like Georgia, not to wealthy, Western nations like little New Zealand.
And if the DI AR was such a stinky piece of shit, everybody who put one into the competition would have been eliminated and one of the short-stroke options would have been selected. This didn't happen.
Beretta's last batch of M9s exceeded the US Army's reliability requirements for the M17/M18 by a very, very wide margin, as I recall. And the 92 has a well-deserved reputation for being accurate.
Also: Efforts to unseat the AR-15/M16 started in the 1960s, with the HK33. Hell, Eugene Stoner and ArmaLite both started trying to unseat the weapon almost as soon as the XM16E1 was provisionally adopted for US airmobile and special forces in Vietnam. And none of them have succeeded. Maybe these tests are totally bullshit and don't represent actual real-world conditions and that's why the guys on the sharp-end of the spear keep picking AR-15s over everything else that's available.
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