Hi guys, thanks for tuning in another video on forgottenweapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum.
And I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction Company and we're taking a look at this OA96 pistol,
which is a perfect example of
How people will inevitably attempt to find ways around any new law
whether it's firearms law or any other law, so
To start at the beginning of this story really the reason that this exists is in
1993 a company called Olympic Arms came up with this neat new thing
They came up with a way to give you an ar-15 with a side folding stock. Now traditionally
This had been impossible because the ar-15 has a nice long bolt carrier and then it has a recoil spring and buffer that extend back
Inside the buttstock. So there's a buffer tube that comes out the back of the receiver and
you can make like a collapsing stock ar-15 which where the stock can get as short as the buffer tube is but there was
before this there hadn't been any way to actually fold the stock because
The buffer tube can't fold that spring doesn't fold in addition to this allowing you to have a folding stock
It also meant you could make a pistol version of the ar-15 which is in itself a workaround
When the National Firearms Act was passed in 1934 as it was originally written
it would have prohibited handguns or it would have regulated them the same way that it currently regulates machine guns and
They figured well, we have to have there's a loophole here
what if someone just gets a rifle and cuts it down to the length of a pistol so
They included language in the National Firearms Act to prohibit or regulate in the same way
short-barreled rifles and short-barreled shotguns and then
Through some lobbying, the handgun section of that law was removed before it was passed
But they never got rid of the sections about short-barreled rifles. So
We have kind of a unique situation
here in the United States where you're allowed to have a rifle and you're allowed to have a pistol, but you're not allowed to have
Basically something in between if it's got a short barrel and a buttstock
It's controlled like a machine gun
And for this reason there have always been people who like well, I want an AR-15 with a little tiny short barrel
But it can't have a buttstock. So we'll get a pistol version of it and in recent days this has
Evolved through the the arm brace thing which we don;t need to get into today
but suffice to say there was also a market for ar-15 pistols and
What Olympic Arms did also allowed them to make a pistol version of AR
Which is basically this. Now the way they did this was by actually moving the recoil spring up into this tube
Above the top of the receiver it mechanically it's really kind of a clever thing and they did this in
1993 which is like
Almost the worst possible time that they could have because the very next year in 94
The assault weapons ban was passed in the United States and all of a sudden
A gun like this became considered an assault weapon and was legally prohibited from being manufactured
so
Olympic obviously didn't want to just fold up and go away and people still wanted to get the guns
In fact people wanted them even more now that they were more heavily regulated. So Olympic took some time and
in July of
1996 this was approved by ATF as not being an assault weapon and
You might be wondering how it does that there's got a 30-round magazine here. It's got a pistol grip. It's got no buttstock
It's got a flash hider. Well the trick here is this doesn't actually have a detachable magazine. Ah
Yes jb weld used by nothing, but the finest purveyors of precision engineering
Our receiver markings
He's got a 1996 prefix on the serial number Cal 2.23 model OA-
96 made by Olympic arms out of Olympia, Washington
Now the other thing to note here is they have actually gone through and welded the magazine body into the receiver there
There is no magazine release button. They just simply didn't mill that out on the lower receiver
And then they have liberally filled the gap between the magazine and the magazine
well with, what I assume is jb weld or something similar some sort of epoxy like adhesive; permanent adhesive
And presto it's not quote on quote an assault pistol. The definition of of an assault pistol was
Initially predicated on it has to be a handgun
with a detachable magazine, which then had
Several specific features or some you know, some of a list of features. Well, this is no longer a detachable magazine
therefore it can have all of the features that they want which included things like a barrel shroud a
flash hider
That sort of thing now you may be wondering
That's that's all fine and good
And in fact this got to have a 30-round magazine because as long as it was a fixed magazine
The law didn't say anything about how many rounds it could or could not hold the question is, of course
How do you actually load it? Are you supposed to like get in
Here and stuff rounds in or what?
Well, the answer lies in in looking at the fact that there is no takedown pin on this either which should be right there
There's a front pin but no rear one and instead we have a button on the back here when you push that button in
The whole thing pivots open so that button
controls a little latch right there and they have added this tapered plunger to the back of the receiver and
presto
That locks it in place and allows you to pop it open
once it's opened then you can manually reload this using individual rounds or you could probably
I suspect you could make a stripper clip guide sort of thing that would sit on there and allow you to load it that way
once it's loaded just
Snap it back together and it's ready to use again
Now some people are going to note that there's no forward assist on this that has nothing to do with
The assault weapon or lack thereof nature of the gun
This has to do with the actual conversion to use this separate recoil assembly
Now I detailed this on my video on the OA98
So if you want to see how it works take a look at that video I pull the whole thing apart
But basically they cut the back end off of the bolt carrier
So there are you can see the serrations right here that the forward assist would normally engage on
Usually you would then have you know a whole a couple inches of those serrations on the back end of the bolt carrier
That back end doesn't exist anymore. This would do nothing. So they just plugged it and they used it as a sling attachment point
The charging handle you'll see is not back here the charging handle is now up here
Like so there we go lock it all the way back
They did put a nice flash hider on it, that's a good vortex flash hider or appears to be
So the OA96 here would only last a couple of years not because it was prohibited
but of course because what people wanted was not this fixed magazine thing people wanted a 30-round magazine be able to take mags in take
them out replace them and
While this was on the market Olympic Arms was working on trying to come up with something that would do that and in 1998
They in fact did it they had they introduced the OA98
Pistol and what it did was take advantage of what I suppose is a loophole in the assault weapons law not really a loophole
That the technical definition of an assault pistol in the law
One of the components was weight and if the gun weighed too much that counted against it
well Olympic came up with a version of this where they
Skeletonized the living bejesus out of everything and brought the weight under that limit
I'm sure the people who wrote the law didn't anticipate that it would be possible to do that. But Olympic did
And we actually have a video on the OA98 as well
So if you're interested in this you should definitely stick around there will be a link at the very end of this video
Where you can see what they did with the OA98 because that's the next step in the same family
now if you would like more information on this one specifically the 96
Rock island's catalog page has their pictures their price estimate everything you would need to know about it
And you can reach that by way of forgottenweapons.com which is linked in the description text below. Thanks for watching