The AR-15 wasn’t supposed to be a bestseller.
The rugged, powerful weapon was originally designed as a soldiers’ rifle in the late 1950s. “An outstanding weapon with phenomenal lethality,” an internal Pentagon report raved. It soon became standard issue for U.S. troops in the Vietnam War, where the weapon earned a new name: the M16.
First paragraph is a massive lie, go figure…
And note they leave out the part where it was rejected and instead the m-16 was adopted