Rifles

Stag Arms LLC. is the oldest new company in the AR-15 marketplace. By that I mean the Stag brand itself may be new (it was, after all, introduced in 2003), but its parent company, Continental Machine & Tool, has been a major producer of component parts for military and consumer AR-15 manufacturers since the Vietnam War. It's highly unlikely that anyone who has fired any U.S.-label AR-15 rifle in the last 30 years was using a gun that did not contain CMT-made parts. For the last dozen years, in fact, it has manufactured about 80 percent of all parts for U.S. AR manufacturers--up to 10,000 triggers and hammers a month for AR-15s and M16s in peak periods.

CMT was founded by Ted Malkowski, who started off in the late 1960s by renting machine time from his employer to produce aerospace components for gas turbine engines and soon set up his own company as a military-contract supplier of naval, ordnance and vehicle parts--and AR-15s. When civilian demand for tactical-type rifles began to surge in the aftermath of 9/11 and the expiration of the Clinton Administration's Assault Weapons Ban, Ted's son Mark decided CMT should come out of the shadows and begin producing complete AR-15 rifles with its own parts instead of just being a background supplier for other name brands. Stag Arms was born.

Mark also had a unique idea. As a left-hander, he'd long been frustrated by the lack of semiauto rifles for his side of the shooting fence, and it occurred to him that one way for his new company to make a splash in the already-crowded AR-15 marketplace was to offer a left-handed gun. So he reengineered the standard AR-15 bolt, charging handle and entire upper receiver for true left-handed operation with a standard AR-15 lower receiver and presented it to the world. The “L” series of Stag-15 rifles got a lot of immediate attention from firearms publications, which, combined with the high quality and reasonable price point of both the left-hand and accompanying right-hand Stag versions, very quickly established the new company as a major AR-15 player.

Upping the Ante
The newest Stag-15 Model 6 Super Varminter is designed, as Stag's website so charmingly puts it, “for those hard-to-reach places.” Intended as a pure accuracy tool, it is set up as what, in the bolt-gun world, would be termed a “heavy varmint package,” weighing in at a hefty 9.7 pounds, unloaded, no sights. It features a mil-spec 5.56 NATO chamber in a 24-inch, 1:8-twist, stainless steel, heavy match barrel with a precision 11-degree target crown. The barrel is surrounded by a fluted, free-float, aluminum handguard, with swivel stud for easy attachment of bipod or sling. The Model 6 SV features a two-stage match trigger, Hogue rubber pistol grip, fixed standard A2-type stock and forged-aluminum mil-spec A4 (flattop) upper receiver, allowing an almost infinite variety of configurations for optical sights, mounts and accessories. The M6 SV comes with a standard 10-round magazine. Stag manufactures all its major components in-house, including the mirror-image forging dies for the left-hand models. This allows the company to maintain its own matched tolerance sets, which reduces fitting adjustments and keeps costs below many competitors who actually utilize less expensive parts. Stag isn't afraid to make claims either, stating bluntly on its website that the new Model 6 SV will shoot one-half MOA.