Colt's New Rifle

The gun that blazed the trails of the Western frontier was the famous six-shooter made by Colt's Patent Firearms Mfg. Co. One hundred and twenty-seven years after its founding, Colt is still capable of kicking up dust. After a lengthy dispute within the Pentagon over whether to adopt a new rifle, the Defense Department earlier this month granted Colt, still the nation's largest maker of pistols and revolvers, a $13.3 million order to turn out an ingenious Colt rifle that has already proved its worth on a new frontier: the jungles of South Viet Nam. Originally called the Armalite, the rifle has now been officially designated the M16. Last week Colt began setting up M-16 production lines in new quarters in West Hartford, Conn., and workmen laid the foundations of a $300,000 enclosed shooting range to test the rifle.

The M-16 shoots faster and is less likely to jam than the U.S. Army's standard rifle, the M-14. Though its firing range is not as great, it is smaller and lighter (6.4 Ibs. v. 8.7 Ibs.) than the M-14, a fact that makes it ideal for guerrilla-type fighting and more practicable for the U.S.'s small-statured Asian allies, who find standard U.S. rifles too big to handle. Most of the 104,000 M-16s that Colt will make under the new contract will be shipped to U.S. airborne divisions and Special Forces. If the rifle continues to impress U.S. defense planners--it is already highly popular with the troops--it could become the standard U.S. assault rifle of the next decade, run up millions of dollars in orders.

Guerrilla fighting is something that Founder Samuel Colt probably would have appreciated. Fascinated by gunpowder, he literally blew up his boarding school as a youth and was packed off to sea by his father. Watching the spinning spokes of the helmsman's wheel, he got the idea for the first revolver, financed production of prototypes by touring the West and selling doses of laughing gas to entertainment-starved settlers. The Mexican War made him big, and he expanded by selling to all comers, including Southern secessionists right up until the shooting at Fort Sumter. After his death in 1862, a succession of brilliant Yankee gun-smiths made Colt the world's most famous name in hand guns.

Colt got the M-16 in a roundabout way. The new rifle was invented by a West Coast gunsmith, who sold the patent to the Fairchild Stratos Corp. Not equipped to make guns, Fairchild four years ago sold the rights to Colt, whose know-how quickly worked the bugs out of the gun. Colt needed a going thing. Having fallen on hard times after World War II, the company in 1955 was taken over by Penn-Texas Corp., which later became Fairbanks Whitney. A vast conglomeration of ill-matched companies, Fairbanks Whitney has run through four separate managements in the past eight years and run up heavy losses. Under its new chairman, George A. Strichman (TIME, Feb. 15), the company has cut its loss for 1963's first nine months to $1,300,000. A healthy profit by Colt on its M-16s could help put Fairbanks Whitney into the black.

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