You’ve probably heard of the Barrett 50 caliber. It’s one of the most powerful sniper rifles ever made. But the story of how it was created and what happened once it got out into the world has some darker chapters that don’t get told as often. So today, we’re telling you the whole thing start to finish.

 The origin of this rifle is fascinating on its own, and you need to understand it before we get to what happened once it finally went to war. So that’s where we’re going to start. The 50BMG, standing for 50 caliber Browning machine gun cartridge, has roots going back over a century. In 1917, John Browning began scaling up his 306 M1917 machine gun design to meet the needs of World War I.

Armored planes and tanks were now getting difficult to kill by standard rifle bullets. So, none other than John Browning delivered a weapon that’s still used to this very day. the legendary M2 Browning heavy machine gun, Marduce, or just known as the 50 caliber. We have a whole video on it, and I’ll put a link at the end of this one if you want to see more of that story.

 But for the Barrett sniper rifle, here’s how that cartridge inspired it. Designated 12.7 by 99 mm NATO under standardization agreements, the 50BMG fires a bullet weighing about 650 grains, roughly 12 times heavier than the 5.56 mm round, for example. Muzzle energy reaches 10 to 15,000 ft-lb compared to 2 to 3,000 foot-lb for the already powerful 306 Springfield.

 That means the round delivers roughly five times the energy of a typical rifle cartridge. This was a bullet designed to punch through engine blocks, aircraft skin, and concrete. And nobody had ever thought to fire it from a rifle a single soldier could carry. Before Ronnie Barrett’s invention, one man had shown that the 50BMG cartridge could serve as a precision sniper round.

Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock, the legendary Marine sniper with 93 confirmed kills in Vietnam, mounted an eight power unerting machine gun. In 1967, Hathcock made a shot that would stand as the longest confirmed sniper kill for 35 years, about 2400 yd or roughly a mile and a half.

 He fired two rounds at a Vietkong gorilla pushing a bicycle carrying ammunition. The first round hit the bicycle and the second hit the target in the chest as he stood up. This proved that 50 BMG had extraordinary long-range precision potential. But a single soldier couldn’t quite carry with him an 84lb machine gun with a strapped scope, sandbags, and a tripod.

 Someone needed to find a portable solution. To make a long story short, here is how that solution appeared through the most unexpected way. Ronny Barrett was a professional photographer with zero engineering background, but he loved shooting and working around the guns. One day, Barrett received an unexpected call to photograph a riverine patrol boat prototype on Percy Priest Lake for a promotional shoot.

 When he arrived, he saw twin M2 Browning 50 caliber machine guns on the boat’s deck, which planted an idea into his mind. Barrett mentioned to a friend that he wanted to build a straight pull bolt-action 50 caliber rifle. His friend replied that the real challenge would be making it semi-automatic, and Barrett accepted that challenge on the spot.

 Because he had no formal engineering training, Barrett drew his designs by hand on newsprint paper. When he took his sketches to local machine shops, they turned him down, basically telling him if his idea was so great, someone smarter would have already built it. Eventually, he found a few people with some engineering skills willing to help.

And working together in a garage, they completed something you could call a prototype in 4 months. It weighed roughly 50 lb, machined from heavy steel bars stock, and it malfunctioned a lot, but it fired. Barrett’s core breakthrough was the short recoil semi-automatic system. When fired, the barrel physically recoils backward about 1 in while still locked to the bolt, absorbing the initial recoil energy.

 An accelerator arm then transfers the recoil energy from barrel to bolt, which unlocks via a curved cam track, extracts the spent case, and loads a new round from a 10 round steel magazine. Combined with a dualchamber muzzle brake that vents exhaust gases left and right, reducing felt recoil by about 70%. And the rifle’s significant weight, the recoil dropped to something manageable, often compared to firing a 12 gauge shotgun.

 I won’t be the judge of that as I have never fired the Barrett, but that’s what it says in the research I found. Buffer springs and a soft recoil pad further dampen the energy transfer to the shooter. So through trial and error, Barrett had achieved what decades of conventional thinking said was impossible. A shoulder-fired semi-automatic rifle chambered in 50BMG that a single infantryman could carry.

The 1982 completion date gave the rifle its first designation, M82. Barrett initially built 30 rifles, which took 9 months to complete, and even worse, they cost $8,000 each to manufacture, but sold for only 2,300. Barrett lost money on the first batch, then again on the second batch at $3,700. Only on the third production run did efficiency and pricing finally make some profit.

 The turning point came when the CIA saw Barrett’s advertisement in Shotgun News magazine and placed orders for rifles to equip Afghan Mujahedin gerillas fighting the Soviet occupation. They would never publicly admit this, but the rifle’s ability to down Soviet helicopters made it ideal for the mountainous terrain and the kind of war that was being fought there.

 This is how the Barrett was first established as an anti-material rifle, meaning it was designed to destroy equipment rather than primarily target individuals. In 1989, the Swedish army became the first military to formally adopt the M82, ordering 100 rifles. Then on August 2nd, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. And without getting too political, in short, the US Marine Corps ordered 125 M82 A1 rifles for their deployment there.

 Production ramped up with about 10 employees working from a small building behind Barrett’s house. Working almost around the clock to reach the order, Barrett rifles were ready just in time for Operation Desert Storm. It was the rifle’s combat debut, and coalition forces quickly found out what it could do.

 They were astonished by its vehicle stopping ability. The Barrett served as an excellent alternative to heavier-mounted weapons like the Bushmaster chain gun and anti-tank missiles. Marines used it to destroy technicals and light armored vehicles like BMPs, engaging targets out to 2,000 yards and beyond. Norwegian forces found another use, shooting landmines and unexloded ordinance from a safe distance, reducing the risk to their explosive ordinance disposal personnel.

The 50BMG round easily detonated even thickwalled projectiles like 155 mm howitzer shells and aircraft bombs. There was another discovery in Desert Storm, though, one that hinted at the rifle’s darker potential. The 50 BMG round devastates the human body. The heavy bullet at such speed creates a massive wound channel as the surrounding tissue compresses and then expands from the pressure.

 Exit wounds can be the size of a grapefruit or larger. Standard infantry body armor offers no protection against it. Even level four plates, the highest rating available to ground troops, are only rated to stop up to 30 or six armor-piercing rounds. while the 50BMG would go through like tissue. Special 50BMG rated ceramic plates were eventually developed for helicopter pilots, but they are over an inch thick and weigh more than 10 lb, making them completely impractical for infantry.

 And even if armor could stop the round, the energy transfer is still catastrophic, crushing organs, breaking ribs, and rupturing blood vessels. So even if it doesn’t go through, you’re going to feel the hit quite a bit. After Desert Storm, the USMC ordered 400 additional rifles through the 1990s, and Barrett continued refining the design based on military feedback.

 Later variants added further improvements and also optimized specifically for Ralphos armor-piercing incendury ammunition and many other features. [music] In summer 2002, the US Army formally adopted the rifle as the M107, officially designated the long range sniper rifle. soon followed the M107A1, which used titanium components instead of steel, added a suppressor ready muzzle brake and hydraulic buffer system and brought the weight down further to about 27 lb.

 Now, before we get to that darker chapter, let’s see what this rifle could actually do in the hands of trained snipers and how some of the ingenious ammunition types work. Let’s first go over the different rounds and then you’ll see how Barretts broke some world records in killing a man from the greatest distance. Aren’t we people a special species? So, standard M33 ball rounds with a copper tip are effective mostly against unarmored targets.

 There are armor-piercing rounds without incendury or explosive effects which use a hardened steel core. Very interesting one is M48 SLAP which fires a subcaliber tungsten penetrator inside a sabot pronounced sabo giving it very high velocity. It’s meant for defeating armor at long range.

 You also have incenduryon rounds like M1 incendury designed to ignite fuel, ammo or equipment with minimal penetration compared to API. Then we have rounds that combine several of these effects like for example silver tipped with a hardened steel core and an incendury compound that ignites on impact. The M8API or armor-piercing incendury is designed for armored and flammable targets.

 But the real star of the show is the Ralphos MK211, a Norwegian-designed multi-purpose round that combines three effects into one bullet. It features a tungsten carbide penetrator, zuconium powder for incendury effect, and a small amount of high explosive. Its tip is green with a gray ring. This round first punches through armor, then detonates and ignites about 30 to 40 cm after impact.

It can penetrate 11 mm of rolled homogeneous armor at 1,000 m. One round costs around $75 to $100 at military pricing. Okay, so now what happens when you give this rifle in the hands of trained snipers and they see targets at over a mile away? In April 2004, Marine Scout sniper Steve Reich was positioned on top of an abandoned oil storage tank in Iraq.

 Through his spotting scope, he detected an IED concealed in a dead animal carcass. When a disposal team arrived, insurgents launched an ambush with RPGs and machine gun fire. Raichett engaged an enemy machine gunner from about 1,600 m, roughly 1 mile away. The first shot missed, but he adjusted for wind and elevation, and the second shot killed the target.

 Then he spotted three insurgents climbing stairs behind a building, now obstructed from direct fire, shielded by a brick wall. But if you are using Ralphos rounds, this is not really a problem. Reich fired where he estimated the insurgents stood behind the wall. The rounds went through the wall and he could see some red splashes behind it.

 You can guess what these were. Over the next 13 hours, Reich killed nine insurgents. Some of them he couldn’t even see directly that were hiding behind that wall, and he was awarded the Bronze Star for that action. In January 2008, Army Specialist Nicholas Ranstad was catching a nap at Checkpoint Delta in Afghanistan when his spotter woke him.

 Four Taliban fighters were spotted at roughly 2100 m, which was beyond the adjustable range of his scope. He would have to hold over, aiming above the target to compensate for bullet drop at that extreme distance. When one fighter broke cover, Ranstad fired. The distance was confirmed at just over 2100 m, making it the longest US sniper kill recorded in Afghanistan.

 In April 2012, two Australian sniper teams from the second commando regiment engaged a Taliban commander in Helman Province. The distance was 2800 m. At that range, the bullet spends about 6 seconds in flight. Both teams use Barrett M82 A1 rifles with Schmidt and Bender scopes. GPS confirmed the distance and all three spotters confirmed the hit, though nobody knows which sniper fired the fatal shot.

 This stood as the world’s longest confirmed kill until 2017 when a Canadian sniper broke the record with a McMillan Tac 50 at 3500 meters. However, five of the 20 longest confirmed sniper kills in history were made with Barrett M82 variants. One more story before we move on to what happens when these sniper rifles get in hands of people they shouldn’t.

 Although this story is quite different. Don Cook, a Marine Corps veteran, was working customer service at Barrett Firearms when he received an unusual call. A Marine unit in Afghanistan, was experiencing malfunctions with their M107 during an active firefight. Cook could hear gunfire in the background. During maintenance the previous night, Marines had accidentally bent the ears of the lower receiver, which now caused malfunctions during the firefight.

Without seeing the weapon, Cook diagnosed the issue over the phone and instructed them to use the bottom of the bolt carrier to bend the ears back into place. The Marines had the rifle operational again within a few minutes. They said, “Thank you very much for the help,” then went back to the firefight. Cook later said it was probably one of the biggest highlights in his life to be able to help a Marine unit in a firefight from thousands of miles away.

So, the rifle had proven itself beyond any doubt in the hands of American forces. But the same qualities were about to create a problem nobody could expect. The Barrett M82 is legal for civilian purchase in most US states with price around $8 to $10,000. And this somehow created a trafficking pipeline into Mexico.

 It’s called straw purchasing where cartel operatives recruit US citizens with clean records to buy firearms legally from licensed dealers. These buyers then transport the weapons to border regions and smuggle them south one by one or disassembled. Serial numbers are filed off to make the weapons harder to trace while their previous owners simply report them as stolen.

 Then the 50 caliber rifle disrupted the already questionable balance of power between Mexican cartels and the country’s police forces. State and local police were simply not equipped to deal with a weapon that could shoot down helicopters. And they did shoot down quite a few, penetrate armored vehicles, and go through their body armor like paper.

 And that’s exactly what started happening. Cartel gunmen used Barrett rifles to shoot down police helicopters. They ambushed police convoys, assassinations of high-ranking officials. The rifle became a symbol of cartel firepower, which left the military as the only force capable of actually fighting the cartels on equal terms.

 And if you think that this couldn’t get any more bizarre, a Mexican band literally named itself Calibra 50, which became incredibly famous. Imagine telling Barrett how far his weapon would get while he was still working on the prototype. However, in 2021, the Mexican government filed a civil lawsuit against 10 US gun manufacturers, including Barrett Firearms, seeking $10 billion in damages.

 Regarding Barrett specifically, Mexico’s filing stated that Barrett makes a 50 caliber sniper rifle that has become one of the cartel’s preferred weapons, and that Barrett knows its distributors sell these military weapons to traffickers. But in 2022, a district judge dismissed the case. So the lawsuit was over, but the rifles were still out there.

 The US military is now transitioning to a multi-caliber precision rifle chambered in 338 Norma Magnum rather than 50 BMG. And this rifle was designed by Chris Barrett, Ronny Barrett’s son. The MK22 will replace the M107 for sniper teams, though the 50 caliber may be moved back to its original role as a dedicated anti-material weapon rather than a sniper rifle.

 And Chris and Ronnie Barrett are the first father-son pair to each design a rifle officially adopted by the US military. Now, quite the plot twist. In 2004, California became the first state to ban 50 BMG rifles. Barrett then responded that his company wouldn’t sell to or service any of its rifles in the possession of any California government agency.

 Barrett also developed the 416 Barrett cartridge specifically to circumvent California’s ban, which is basically just a necked down 50BMG case with a slightly smaller caliber bullet with comparable ballistics. So the band could be worked