A couple people had expressed interest in this topic, and I have a bit of extra time for a couple days, so here goes:
Bona fides: I am a former infantry NCO and sniper, hunter, competitive shooter, reloader, hobby gunsmith, sometimes firearms trainer and currently work in a gun shop, mostly on the paperwork/compliance side. Back in the day, was a qualified expert with every standard small arm in the US inventory circa 2003 (M2, 4, 9, 16, 19, 249, 240B, 21, 24, 82 etc.), and today hang around the 75th percentile of USPSA classifications. I've shot Cap-and-Ball, Trap and Sporting Clays badly; Bullseye and PRS somewhat better and IDPA/USPSA/UML/Two-gun with some local success. Been active in the 2A community since the mid-90s, got my first instructor cert in high school, and have held a CPL for almost twenty years now.
I certainly don't claim to be an expert in every aspect of firearms, there's huge areas that escape my knowledge base, but if you've got questions I'll do my best to answer.
Technical questions
Gun control proposals for feasibility
Industry
Training
Wacky opinions
General geekery
Some competition links (not my own) just for the interested.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=U5IhsWamaLY&t=173
https://youtube.com/watch?v=93nEEINflXE
https://youtube.com/watch?v=utcky0zq10E
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
I don't know much more than the bare bones of the controversy, so I certainly don't know enough to judge.
Normally, I'll side with reports from soldiers in the field over the politically connected defense contractor any time.
But it's also a thing where trained soldiers go to shit in the field and blame the hardware for their own induced problems.
Or real but relatively minor technical glitches get ironed out, but not before the tales of the glitch permanently attach themselves to a weapon system. The M16 had this, where its opponents in the Army forced changes to the design that fucked it up, the guns ran shitty in combat during limited field testing, so they changed things back and mostly the weapon performed at or above standard. But during that "limited field testing" a whole lot of joes got in firefights with unreliable guns, and the legend never died.
And no, I don't think Ian is taking money from HK to lie about his testing. He might be wrong. He might be biased toward HK for some unknown and unprovable reason. But I don't think he's on the payroll.
This wasn't really a minor glitch, it was range training staff complaining the rifles lose zero if left out in the sun, and also some report of unacceptable dispersion from Afghanistan engagement.
Which people dismissed because soldiers always fire too quickly and melt their guns.
However, the range guys weren't doing it, Fraunhofer institute testing found it was .. bad, but H&K won in court because the contract, as agreed on, stipulated gun had to stay accurate only with an extremely low rate of fire, e.g. bolt-action.
If you carefully read their statement here, they never say the guns are accurate if left out in the sun, just that they fulfilled the contract.
I believe the guns are probably sound, if they use a suitable polymer for the reciever. The guns Ian tested had some really fancy stuff polymer filled with fiberglass or something like that.
He didn't test any of the original guns, or any original type recievers, so his opinion, based on the test, was IMO mostly irrelevant, but he didn't say so.
Probably not 'sold out' , more likely didn't want to get into shit with H&K reps or something. That's when I lost a lot of faith I had in him. Guy seemed so knowledgeable.
You're very invested in a pretty minor dispute between parts of the german government. Are you upset because you dislike HK, or because you want to like them?
I was upset because I liked watching McCollum's videos and then when he got into a subject I've encountered before at some US gun blog, he seemed really to be in the wrong and unwilling to even consider he's wrong (my impression, I may be wrong).
You think you can trust someone on guns and then find they're only too human.
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I'm gonna argue the other side of this. Here's the video in question.
Neither point-of-impact shift nor group expansion as a gun heats up under rapid fire are equivalent to catastrophic loss of zero. All guns suffer both to a greater or lesser extent, depending on details of construction like barrel mass. The G36 uses a low-mass barrel, so it's going to tend to have more of both, but I've seen no evidence that either amounts to a catastrophic loss of accuracy.
Germany adopted the G36 in 1997. German officials claim to have discovered that the rifle suffers catastrophic loss of accuracy after two magazines of rapid fire in 2012, 15 years later, and a full decade after Germany began deploying troops to Afghanistan for combat operations.
In addition to the Bundeswehr, the G36 has been adopted as the standard-issue service rifle for Spain, Thailand, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, the Philippines, and Portugal, as well as elite military and police units in 46 different countries, among them the US and Mexico. To my knowledge, none of the numerous end-users in any of these other countries have detected this catastrophic flaw in the G36's design in the fifteen or so years that it's been in service. I am pretty confident that American SWAT teams have tried to rapid-fire their G36s at some point. I am very sure that the Mexican National Police have tried to rapid fire their rifles, since they've spent most of those 15 years fighting an exceedingly hot guerrilla war with the Cartels.
So we have a claim of a obvious, catastrophic design flaw in a mass-produced and widely-adopted automatic rifle, which only one organization is able to detect, which coincidentally allows them to halt payments on a major defense contract during an economic crisis. They announce trials for a new rifle with updated requirements, which none of the submissions to that trial can actually pass, which is a fair indication that they aren't actually practical requirements. The German army wasn't actually able to find a better rifle by the standards the g36 was adopted under.
No part of this story is credible. If the g36 melted under rapid fire, it would have been noted in the trials, and it would have been impossible to miss when the Bundeswehr deployed to Afghanistan in the early 2000s. It would have been noted in the evaluations of multiple other military and police units, no few of which went on to adopt it as standard issue. There would be no possible way to cover it up.
There's no evidence I've seen that the rifles are inaccurate if left out in the sun, and fulfilled the contract means they meet the specifications the German army set. I'm pretty sure those specifications don't mandate a limit on fire comparable to a bolt-action.
What's your evidence that the rifles Ian (Karl, actually) tested had "some really fancy polymer"? My understanding is that pretty much all polymer firearms parts are filled with fiberglass. Far from being "fancy", strength-enhancing fillers are a bog-standard additive used in pretty much all resin and polymer manufacture, because the fillers both add significant strength to the part and generally cost less than the volume of plastic they displace. For what it's worth, having dabbled in the industry in a former life, I would expect a bespoke small-batch polymer part to be far more likely to have problems than a mass-produced part; factories generally are going to have had a whole lot more resources and investment in ironing out the bugs in the production process.
Presumably that would be because there are no original guns available to test, since the g36 isn't available to civilians in the US. Can you point to any actual tests by anyone outside the German government that corroborate the German government's claims? Any civilian or police tests? Any data at all?
They got a rebuild from a bespoke manufacturer using as many German parts as possible, and saw no issues. None of the ~80 police and military units issuing the g36 detected the problems in either evaluation or service, and neither did the Germans themselves for a decade and a half, ten years of that being actual combat operations.
What makes you confident that this problem actually exists at all, much less that Ian and Karl are attempting to cover it up?
https://www.themotte.org/post/296/im-a-gun-guy-ama/51607?context=8#context
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