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Old 10-27-2011, 01:20 AM
mjp28 mjp28 is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2011
Location: anytown, OHIO
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Default The OUTDOOR CHANNEL, Wednesday night, all about guns.

The OUTDOOR CHANNEL, Wednesday night, all about guns.

This is one of my "must see TV" nights, anyone else watch it?

Tonight on Gun Stories was about photographer Ronnie Barrett and how he developed something very different, a .50 cal. rifle, just before the Gulf War hit. The rest is history.

Barrett was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee in 1954, and graduated from Murfreesboro Central High School. He started his career in 1972 as a professional photographer. In 1982, while he owned a photography studio, he got his initial inspiration to create what would become the Barrett signature product. On January 1, 1982, when Barrett was photographing a river patrol gunboat on the Stones River near Nashville, Tennessee, he created an award-winning picture that made him start thinking about the .50 caliber cartridge because of two Browning machineguns mounted prominently on that boat.

Since no commercially available .50 caliber rifle existed at that time, he decided to make a semi-automatic weapon. With no background in manufacturing or engineering, Barrett sketched a cross-sectioned, full-size rifle, adding different components to it. Once he decided on the concept, he approached some machine shops with his drawings. They told him that if his idea was any good, someone smarter would have already designed it


Barrett Firearms Manufacturing was founded by Ronnie Barrett for the sole purpose of building semi-automatic rifles chambered for the powerful 12.7×99mm NATO (.50 BMG) ammunition, originally developed for and used in M2 Browning machine guns. Barrett began his work in the early 1980s and the first working rifles were available in 1982, hence the designation M82. Barrett designed every single part of the weapon personally and then went on to market the weapon and mass produce it out of his own pocket. He continued to develop his rifle through the 1980s, and developed the improved M82A1 rifle by 1986.

Last edited by mjp28; 11-17-2011 at 05:19 AM.
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