OK, I’m about to be very, very mean about your idea, so I need to preface this by saying that I fully get that it sounds perfectly reasonable if you don’t happen to know a lot of very specific stuff about how militaries, especially the Canadian military, actually operate. So, to be clear, I’m not trying to call you an idiot, I’m just correcting a misunderstanding. But oh boy is there a lot of misunderstanding here to correct.

So, first off, you’d have to be talking very specifically about weapons that the military actually has in service. These would also have to be weapons that have a civilian counterpart. That means no machine guns, Carl G’s, or anything like that. We’re talking C7, C8, and maybe a couple of specific models of pistol.

So the vast and overwhelming majority of these weapons would be completely useless to our military. Yes, of course a well trained soldier can be lethal with anything, but wars are won with logistics. When you issue a gun, you have to also have the ability to issue spare parts and ammo for that gun. As much as possible stuff has to be interoperable. Nobody wants to have to keep track of which specific soldier is carting around an SKS so you can somehow procure 7.62x39 and issue it to them. And even weapons with the same calibre don’t actually use the same ammo; all the rounds we use are ballistically matched to the weapons that fire them. That means the weight of the bullet and the amount and strength of the powder are carefully tuned so that the weapon cycles correctly and the bullet exits the barrel at the exact right microsecond that the resonant wave setup in the barrel is at its flattest point, ensuring a smooth trajectory.

But let’s say we talk about the AR-15 specifically. That’s what our military uses, right? We just call it the C7 or the C8, depending on the barrel length. Even if we don’t use the guns as is, surely we could send all those civilian AR-15 parts over to them?

Except that’s not even remotely true. The Colt Canada C7 and C8 are based on the Colt M16 technical package, but the design includes over 160 modifications that Diemaco made, down to miniscule changes on tolerances, all to build a rifle with the reliability our forces need, even in the extreme conditions we fight and train in.

Even if you could use the parts from a civilian AR-15 in a military C7, they would never ever pass our quality control standards. Colt Canada builds all their weapons at a facility in Kingston Ontario. They have staff members whose entire job is just checking that their tools are correctly calibrated. Every third shift they calibrate every single machine, tool and die in the entire facility. It is no exaggeration to say that the C7 and C8 are the highest quality AR-15 variants in the world. That’s why special forces from other countries buy them so often.

Oh, by the way, Colt Canada also builds most of the other weapons we use, even the ones designed by other manufacturers. Generally what we do is buy the rights to have it produced by Colt Canada, then get them to do the actual manufacturing so that we can ensure our weapons are supplied domestically and at the highest possible quality. So even if you do buy a weapon that our military uses, in most cases you haven’t actually bought the same weapon really.

Anyway, technically, you could use parts from the SA20 - the civilian variant of the C7 - because by law Colt Canada is not allowed to make those to a different standard (this is to remove any chance of a civilian quality part accidentally getting sent to the CAF). Technically. Except there’s not a chance in hell that the CAF would ever accept a part that did not come brand new, factory sealed, directly from Kingston. I cannot remotely stress enough to you how seriously they take quality control when it comes to weapons.

For the record, before posting this I turned to the actual CAF infanteer sitting next to me and asked for their opinion on this idea. They looked at me in stunned horror, got up and walked out of the room without saying a word.