Work life is full of change. Some good and some bad, but we roll with it and take the opportunities when we can. About a year and a half ago, I got the opportunity to go to SWAT school, and having passed SWAT school, I was offered a slot on the local regional SWAT team. A position that no one in the last 16 years has held from my agency. My Sheriff was gracious enough to allow me to take the opportunity, and now I’m low man on the totem pole, but that’s another article!
Holosun AEMS: Building My SWAT Rifle
Going through SWAT school, I used my old and very trusty rebuilt Bushmaster Ar15 with a 16-inch barrel. Clearing rooms over and over again with the 16-inch rifle didn’t seem like a bad idea, but the jokes about my “musket” and my own comparisons against both the locally issued SBRs and machine guns the cadre and other students carried, and the Ar15 braced “pistols” other students carried made me continually reevaluate my rifle. It definitely is easier to clear rooms with a short rifle than a longer one.
When I passed SWAT school, I had to figure out how to bridge the gap between the personally owned gear I had and the team gear that I needed. This included getting a new helmet, comms gear, and night vision. A talk with the Sheriff, and he got local businesses to donate money for the gear. The community really came together to provide gear to keep me safe.
A month or two later, I had a brand new PVS-14, a ballistic helmet to mount it on and Peltor hearing protection that wired directly into my radio, which now had added channels for SWAT. Which, as you can guess, cost a pretty penny but quickly turned out to be well worth the expense.
Facebook / Photo by Greg Skaz Photography
Which left me with my musket issue. I did a quick eval of my options and decided against a braced pistol. I could see the upcoming legal issues on the horizon and for a rifle I would be using in a law enforcement capacity was not an issue I wanted to have to deal with. This left me the options of buying my own SBR or figuring out how to have the office buy one. Having just spent a few grand of donated office money on gear, I thought it might be a better idea to come up with a creative solution.
I checked our office armory, and we had several federally owned Vietnam-era M16s gathering dust. These were 100% machine guns, and, as we all know, machine guns don’t have a barrel length restriction! A further check of the rules and as long as I could produce the entire gun (all parts) on demand, I could use the lower to construct a gun better suited for the work I was doing. I did a quick check with the Sheriff for his approval, and once I had that in hand, I checked out the best of the M16s to get started.
I made a quick call to my buddy Paul, a very talented hobby AR builder, and we started a parts list. I had an upper from an old project, and a good friend traded me a Colt SBR 11.5-inch barrel in great shape as part of a deal. We ordered a Cross Machine and Tool HDM railed handguard and used a low-profile steel gas block from Troy Industries. I went to the LGS and picked up a new gas tube, and we raided both of our parts boxes for the rest of the parts.
Once we had the parts in place, we stripped the upper off the M16, pulled the bolt carrier group and got started. We pulled the fixed butt stock, buffer tube, buffer and spring from the M16 and installed a new buffer extension tube kit from CMMG. Paul proved his skill by making a very nice stake on the buffer extension plate to lock the whole deal in place.
With the M16 lower together, we ran a quick test of it using the old musket upper. It ran like a top.
Paul and I assembled the new upper. Basically, I sat there and watched Paul do his magic. Proper tools and experience make a difference. Paul took his time and was meticulous going through the upper as he built it. A quick check with headspace gauges and it was off to the range.
Surefire Weapon Lights on Amazon
We stripped my Aimpoint Comp m3 in the lower 3rd co-witness Larue mount off the musket, as well as the Vickers Blue Force padded sling and mounts, the stock, and the Surefire X300UB. With it all bolted up, we grabbed our gear and went, you guessed it, to the range. I spent the better part of the afternoon zeroing and running rounds through the now 11.5-inch M16. We quickly moved the MagPul BUIS to match the now zeroed dot and shot irons only to verify. I shot a qualification and a full auto familiarization, and the 11.5 was in service.
We were certainly running, but I wasn’t through with it. After a couple of months, I decided I needed to go ahead and replace the Aimpoint Comp M3, which had given me more than a decade and a half of service through all sorts of training and work on duty. I did my research and found a suitable replacement or update, should I say.
When I first built the musket for work, the only two choices for a red dot were Aimpoint and EoTech. The EoTech reticle always looked a bit too busy for my eye. I have a slight astigmatism, which makes me see the EoTech reticle as glittery and to me, distracting. Nothing bad about the product, just how it worked for me.
That being said, the Aimpoint reticle has never looked like a dot to me, either. It looks like a starburst. The brighter I turn up the Aimpoint, the larger the star appears to me. Which, while it may seem like a disadvantage, I always saw it as an advantage because I could dial it down until I had to work to see it and dial back up one setting for zeroing. Yet, I could dial it way up and get a bigger bloom for quick shooting. So, the Aimpoint, after a decade and a half, has worked very well for me.
When I went looking for a replacement sight, I wanted to keep the new sight light and easy. Out of everything on the market, the red dot sight that made me look twice was the new Holosun AEMS. Or Advanced Enclosed Micro Sight. When I say it checked the boxes, well, it really checked the boxes for the things I like and the things I wanted to improve on from the Comp M3.
It was lighter, shorter, and offered a clearer picture with a more open and less tubular view due to the mailbox shape of the new design. It came with a lower 3rd co-witness mount, which saved me a few bucks. It is, from the standpoint of the operator, a dot you leave on as it uses the Shake Awake technology. I’ll be honest I prefer the Aimpoint power knob vs press buttons on the AEMS because I can turn my reticle to the setting, I want it on by feel alone. This is not something I can do on the AEMS, but I can leave the AEMS on a decent setting and be assured it would be fine there over long periods of time.
The AEMS also allowed me three reticle designs, with two of the designs of value to me. The first is the single dot, which is my preferred reticle. The second is the EoTech-style circle dot reticle. The third is the (useless to me) circle only. The AEMS has a dozen brightness settings (four-night vision and eight visible) for me to use, has a solar failsafe and a 50,000-hour battery life from the commonly available 2032 battery, which is a lot easier to find in a small town than finding an N battery or such for an older EoTech or Aimpoint. That certainly was one of my considerations when choosing a new RDS.
The AEMS also came with a lower 3rd co-witness mount which simplified it. No need to buy both an expensive new red dot and then have to go and find a mount to put it in. Last but not least, the AEMS has an almost hidden feature: the sacrificial protective see-through covers so cleverly built into the design of the sight that it’s easy to miss them. They are clear and replaceable, which really saves your lenses on the optic. If you ever get them dirty, just pop them open and keep going. If they get scratched up, just pull them off and replace them. They are very well mounted, and as I said before, the design is so well done that you might miss even noticing them on the sight at all…UNTIL YOU NEED THEM.
Holosun AEMS on Amazon
Getting the AEMS was easier than deciding what sight to buy. It arrived from Primary Arms in less than a week. I had it mounted up and adjusted it to match the iron sights in minutes. A bonus of being a firearms instructor for an agency is access to the range. In 15 minutes, we had the zero verified as ready to go.
After a few SWAT calls and a few training sessions, I swapped the Surefire x300 UB for the Streamlight VIR-II, which offered me both a white light weapon light, an IR illuminator AND an IR laser. I mounted it in front of the BUIS at 12 o’clock on the rail, and I zeroed it parallel to the bore using a laser bore sight.
I prefer for most of my weapon lights to use the same Surefire X300UB, but for the SWAT rifle, operating at least part of the time under NODs, I needed both an illuminator and a laser aiming device. The Streamlight offered me that in a package that also allowed for an offsetting, a white light-only setting that allowed me to test the battery and an easy IR setting that has the same controls as the white light.
Next, I picked up the smallest adjustable MagPul stock and installed a QD attachment point for my sling. I went to Slate Black for a handguard grip package, which is where I am now.
The rifle is light, quick, accurate, and reliable. We made several adjustments while running several thousand rounds through it. The 11.5-inch machine gun, during the initial workup, ATE, and I mean chewed up and spit out in pieces, a cheap buffer from the parts bin. I put a brand new H2 from CMMG in, and there have been zero rifle-related hiccups since. There were magazine-related issues which were fixed by disposing of the magazine and buying new ones. Lessons learned.
The next fix for the 11.5 M16 is a common sense move to add a suppressor. When you are shooting within feet of your teammates, suppressors become a necessity. I’m really looking forward to it and to seeing where this rifle project leads me. I’ll probably SBR a personal lower in case I ever need to turn the M16 lower in, and I may get the office to supply a complete rifle before long. But for now, this little machine gun, with a Vietnam-era lower and a built upper I supplied myself, serves me well.
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