Power Personified: The .50-Caliber Barrett M82A1 Anti-Materiel Rifle

Every shooter admires serious power. It is hardwired deep someplace within our DNA. Don’t believe me? Before we dive into the formidable Barrett M82A1 Anti-Materiel Rifle, consider for a moment…muscle cars.

If the mission is simply getting from one place to another, then a well-maintained, late-model Ford Fungus with satellite radio and air conditioning should do nicely. The argument could be made that anything more is overkill. Then you get a look at a 1970’s-era Corvette.

50-Cal Power: The Barrett M82A1 Anti-Materiel Rifle

In case you’ve never had the pleasure, a vintage Corvette Stingray has no cargo space. It will also reliably render you deaf while simultaneously loosening your fillings. The climate control systems are perennially dysfunctional, and a guided missile cruiser gets better gas mileage. Regardless, I would still desperately love to have one of my own in place of my current sensible family funster.

That same weird drive to take everything to extremes pervades the shooting sports as well. It is undeniably edifying to pull in behind a nice precision rifle and print tiny clusters of contiguous holes at insane distances. That just strikes something primal in the typical marginally-civilized American man-child. However, if printing tiny holes if good, punching big, gaping enormous holes is so much better.

The Mission

Back in 1989 when Ronnie Barrett first marketed his eponymous .50-caliber anti-materiel rifle, he added a whole new dimension to the expansive pantheon of modern military weapons. The world was already covered in a thin patina of .30-caliber precision rifles that would put paid to the enemies of our great nation a kilometer or more distant. However, what if the enemy were hiding behind trees, houses, or cars? Thanks to Brother Barrett, how’s that working out for you nowadays?

In military parlance, concealment is something that you can hide behind that won’t stop a bullet. Cover accomplishes the same end but is also proof against small arms fire. The mighty Barrett Light Fifty blurs the traditional line between the two. It takes downrange thump into a whole new space.

I actually saved up forever and bought one of these insane rifles myself. I can now see why Mexican drug cartels might hold them in such high esteem. This thing is just a freaking beast.

No kidding, a friend and I were exercising mine recently. Our targets included a heavy thick-walled steel CO2 gas tank. My buddy center-punched it with a .50-caliber APIT (Armor Piercing Incendiary Tracer) round and somehow set the thing on fire. That big metal gas tank smoked and sputtered for about two minutes before finally calming down. Umm, wow.

Origin Story

Ronnie Barrett launched Barrett Firearms Manufacturing in 1982 with the purpose of contriving a viable shoulder-fired semi-automatic .50 BMG rifle. Ronnie is an interesting guy. He’s not an engineer. He’s a professional photographer. However, he’s also a gun nerd, and he’s clearly exceptionally smart.

.50 BMG is mil-speak for .50-caliber Browning Machine Gun. The bullets it throws are a full half-inch across. John Browning first thought up this bodacious cartridge and the legendary machine gun that fired it at the behest of General John “Blackjack” Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces during WW1. The original mission was to bring down German observation balloons.

Mechanics

The .50 BMG round is basically a scaled-up version of the .30-06 service cartridge. This massive round is just shy of 5.5 inches long and fires a 750-grain bullet at around 2,750 fps. To put that in perspective, one .50 BMG projectile weighs more than a dozen M193 5.56mm bullets.

The M2 HB (Heavy Barrel) gun that Browning designed to throw these enormous things weighs 84 pounds. In 1982, the prevailing wisdom was that it was physically impossible to build an autoloading rifle that could handle such a beastly cartridge and still remain man-portable on the modern battlefield. And then Ronnie Barrett did it anyway.

How Does It Work?

John Moses Browning really did start most everything. When I first pawed over a Barrett M82A1 Anti-Materiel Rifle I was struck with how similar the gun seemed to the classic Browning Auto-5 shotgun. The M82A1 operates via a similar long-recoil action.

At the moment of firing, the barrel and bolt recoil together as a single mechanism. These two components are absolutely massive. Cycling all that mass helps mitigate felt recoil. At a certain point, the bolt and barrel separate. The bolt continues rearward, while the barrel returns forward to its position of rest under spring power.

The M82A1 feeds from a removable ten-round box magazine. Mags must be hooked in front and rocked in place like those of your favorite Kalashnikov. As the bolt cycles it strips rounds semiautomatically just as one might expect.

The M82A1 uses a standard M4 pistol grip. The two-position safety is under the right thumb as it should be, and the trigger is plenty nice for precision work. However, the rest of the action is fairly no-frills. There is no last-round bolt hold open. All this makes the manual of arms straightforward and intuitive.

The long, heavy barrel is fluted along its length to enhance stiffness and mitigate weight. The muzzle is topped with a huge baffled harmonica muzzle brake. This rig very effectively redirects the gun’s prodigious muzzle blast to the sides and rear to help further decrease recoil. However, the experience of standing alongside the gun when it is fired is life-changing. That monster will reliably clear your sinuses. Ask me how I know this.

Military personnel carrying the Barrett M82A1.

Impressions

So, what’s it really like to launch a 750-grain bullet at 2,750 fps off your shoulder? Not as bad as you might think. Ronnie Barrett did a really good job with this bad boy.

All that big, heavy steel cycling back and forth spreads the recoil force out over time. You can actually perceive the recoil cycle for a moment after you squeeze the trigger and the gun fires. Overall the experience is about like shooting a 12-gauge shotgun.

Recoil really is not terribly unpleasant. Muzzle blast, however, is frankly amazing. Like blow crap all over the place and throw dirt in your eyes amazing.

I started out with relatively inexpensive GI-surplus ball machine gun ammo and was disappointed. Even the cheap stuff is still $3-$4 per round. At 100 meters I was getting 3-inch groups. Considering what I had paid for this rifle, that was pretty underwhelming. Then I found some of the good stuff.

Hornady 750-grain A-Max loads are the MAC-daddy of the .50 BMG world. Think contiguous holes at a football field. This stuff is undeniably spendy, but it delivers. With a competent spotter, I was on a 12-inch steel target at 1,000 meters on my third round. Once you get a feel for the gun it will shoot that straight consistently. It is simply that the A-Max ammo really costs too much to burn a whole pile of it at a sitting.

The author shooting long-range targets with the Barrett M82A1.

Ruminations

I first met the Barrett M82 back in the 1990’s when I was a soldier. The EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) teams with which I worked used them to render safe unexploded ordnance from long distances. For range training they just drew 100-round cans of belted Ma Deuce ammo and knocked the rounds loose with a rubber mallet for loading into the Barrett magazines.

A buddy who was a sniper with a Ranger battalion in Afghanistan was issued a Barrett .50-caliber rifle but rarely used it. Nobody wanted to hump that monstrous thing up to the top of a mountain. Even broken down into two one-man loads, that’s a big ask. Additionally, they didn’t have suppressors for these massive guns. As a result, the noise attracted way too much attention.

My friend said that their .30-caliber bolt guns would reach out just about as far and were plenty effective against troops in the open. There was more demand for the long-range, hard-hitting, .50-caliber anti-materiel platform in Iraq’s built-up areas. However, nothing else carried quite so many cool points.

The Barrett M82A1 Anti-Materiel Rifle in civilian hands is a reliable crowd pleaser. The big gun costs as much as a decent used car. Additionally, you’re typically burning $5 to $10 each time you stroke the trigger. However, running a Light Fifty, particularly at truly long ranges, will reliably put hair on your chest regardless of your gender. It’s an absolute beast of a precision rifle.