When I approached Caracal CEO Hamad Al Ameri at their SHOT Show booth I felt like singing Janis Joplin’s Piece of My Heart. Longtime readers know I had a major thing with Caracal’s pistols. Limbo-low bore axis, astounding trigger, deep-handed ergonomics, revolutionary sighting system . . . where was I? Nowhere. Caracal recalled their pistols for frame and drop-safe issues and promised smitten customers a revised 2.0. For the last three years. So when are they coming back to market? “Soon.” And now you know why I’ve been divorced twice. Press release on Caracal’s hookup with Wilcox Industries to make rifles — rifles! — for the U.S. market after the jump . . .
LAS VEGAS, Nevada — Caracal and Wilcox Industries unveiled this week at SHOT Show 2016 the first in their line of integrated tactical rifle systems, the CAR816-A2 with Fusion System Kit [above] designed for the defence and security market with commercial application.
On the new product, Hamad Al Ameri, CEO of Caracal said, “Our partnership with Wilcox has redefined the approach to integrated weapon systems. The CAR816-A2 with Fusion System is the first product collaboration between our two companies, delivering firearms that meet the critical needs of law enforcement officers and the modern warfighter.”
Caracal’s CAR816-A2 is currently being manufactured at Wilcox’s world-class facility in New Hampshire and will be available on a limited basis in 2016. The tactical rifle features a short stroke push rod gas piston operating system, controlled by an adjustable gas block with three positions – supressed, unsupressed and a setting for operating in adverse conditions.
The Wilcox’s Fusion System Kit, a lightweight module rifle forearm system that hosts a quick-change battery compartment within the grip can be integrated into the manufacturing process of the CAR816-A2. This system powers a red dot sight, integrated visible laser, IR laser as well as fixed IR illuminator, and is co-aligned with one windage and elevation knob to boresight the system.
CAR816-A2 rifle with Fusion System Kit option unveiled at SHOT Show 2016
On the eve of SHOT Show 2016, Caracal and Wilcox Industries officially announced their new strategic partnership that will see Caracal guns produced in the United States for the first time.
Looking ahead, Hamad Al Ameri said, “This partnership brings together Caracal with an innovation leader when it comes to tactical products for special forces units. In addition to the CAR816-A2, Wilcox and Caracal will begin manufacturing the CAR 814 direct impingement rifle and the new generation Enhanced F pistol at Wilcox’s facility.” He went on to add, “Our teams are already working together to design and develop new Caracal products customised for the US market, and we look forward to showcasing our progress at SHOT Show 2017.”
In addition to the products manufactured at Wilcox’s facility, Caracal will also be importing under license and on a limited basis the Haenel sniper rifle. The Haenel RS-8 and RS-9 [above] rifles are extremely durable and lightweight sniper rifles with 60degree bolts, 3-lug action and 3 position safety. They feature fully adjustable 2-stage triggers, high-quality barrels and deliver ultimate precision and accuracy and a wholly modular design to allow for the full complement of accessories. The RS-9 was recently awarded the German Army Special Forces Sniper contract for mid range .338 rifles system.
Caracal is the only OEM small arms company in the Middle East, manufacturing firearms, sniper rifles and other light weapons, catering to international civilian, military, law enforcement and sporting markets. Caracal is now being backed by a strong industrial parent company, the Emirates Defence Industries Company (EDIC). This unique arrangement allows for Caracal to receive maximum resources and support in order to drive the next phase of growth for the company, including its new US presence.
Based on significant positive feedback at this year’s show, Caracal will be returning once again to SHOT Show 2017 with an expanded presence to showcase more products and variants for the US commercial and defence and security market.
Back from the dead again? Didn’t they say, last year, that they would be selling guns in 2015? I’m beginning to think that Caracal is just some joke being pulled by some UAE prankster prince who got tired of racing his Lambo.
You’re totally correct. Caracal has a us marketing person who simply tries to keep the hype train rolling. The fact of the matter is; he shows up at shot show every year with a promise of caracal products. Caracal’s excuse in not launching weapons has been wanting to establish some sort of US facility first…This US marketing rep also say’s caracal is a subsidiary of a major conglomerate arabic company. This company could care less about sales in the us market. Caracal is a hype train, so don’t get your panties in a bunch.
Please keep the stewardess buried.
Say, whaaa…?
Sorry, it’s a reference to a Russian joke that probably doesn’t have a local equivalent, now that I think about it. The full one goes like this.
A plane crashes on a remote island somewhere in the Pacific, with only the pilot, the copilot, and a stewardess surviving. They end up being stranded on the island for many months. Pilot keeps a log/diary, which is later found by the rescue party, containing the following entries:
1 month after the crash: threesomes aren’t so bad!
2 months after the crash: I cannot live in this filth and vice anymore. I’m going to shoot the stewardess.
3 months after the crash: I cannot live in this filth and vice anymore. I’m going to bury the stewardess.
4 months after the crash: I cannot live in this filth and vice anymore. I’m going to dig out the stewardess.
Usually, this is referenced by telling someone to “bury the stewardess already”. But in this case, I think it has already been buried for a while, so…
Ah, eastern European humor. 🙂
Years back I worked with a Slovak Iron Curtain jumper, he got out in the mid-1980’s. He gave me an example of a joke considered hilarious in Tranava, Slovak Republic:
(The background on the joke was that poverty in Slovakia was so bad kids had no toys to play with)
One day a Russian policeman was on his rounds in the Slovak countryside. He spies a young boy in a cow pasture playing with a pile of cow shit. “What are you making, boy?” he asked. “These are my heroes, and they are fighting crime to save Slovakia!” he replied. “Well, why don’t you make a policeman?” the cop asked.
“Because I don’t have enough shit” the boy replied.
Supposed to have been quite the joke in Slovakia, circa 1975…
Ah, that sounds familiar. Our version was a bit different, though.
A cop on his beat walks past a playground, and sees a kid making something in a sandbox. He comes closer and asks what it it.
“I’m making a cop out of a dog turd”, the kid replies.
“What the fuck, asshole? Stop that immediately and make someone else, or you’ll be really sorry; I’ll check on you later.”, the cop replies angrily, taps his baton for greater clarity, and walks away.
An hour later, the same cop is walking back past the same playground, and sees the kid again. He comes closer and asks threateningly, “making cops out of turds again, little shit?”.
The kid, scared, quickly replies, “no-no sir, now I’m making firemen out of clay, see!” – and shows the figurines.
The cop ponders that for a moment, and asks, “well, why don’t you make them out of dog turds?”
The kid replies, “I tried, sir, but whatever I make out of dog turds, it just looks like a cop somehow.”
Please, I need more eastern european/russian/similar humor to this! There’s many things out of the area that are questionable for my American tastes, but these are amazing! I would absolutely travel to watch comics like that, if I could understand them. Please, MORE! Or resources where I can hear more. Or both!
I think you’ll find this one quite agreeable and apropos in US today. It’s from Ukraine circa late 40s – early 50s, immediately after WW2, when the local Ukrainian nationalist resistance was still active, but dwindling down fast under NKVD/KGB pressure, and basically going into hibernation. There are other versions for Estonians and Lithuanians, for similar reasons. So:
An Ukrainian goes to his neighbor’s khutor (basically, a small farm), and watches him water the flowers. As he comes closer, he notices an unusual smell, and realizes that it’s synthetic oil.
“What are you doing!” he cries out, “The flowers will wither!”.
The other guy replies, “Fuck the flowers, I don’t want anything to rust.”
And another one, also from West Ukraine:
KGB agents go to a khutor owned by a very old guy and start asking him questions:
“Hey, your neighbors say that you have a Nagant (revolver) buried here somewhere.”
“No way, officers! Nothing of the kind!”
“Your neighbors also say that you have a machine gun buried here somewhere.”
“No way, officers! Nothing of the kind!”
“Your neighbors also say that you have a mortar buried here somewhere.”
“Eh… no offense, officers, but I wish I knew where to get one myself!”
There are some derivative sayings from these. E.g. “at any time and under any government, any true self-respecting Ukrainian/Belarusian has a plot on his farm that he waters with oil”. Also,”time to dig out the stuff at my farm” = SHTF.
As you’d expect, these jokes aren’t really jokes. It’s not uncommon for old people to have firearms from WW2 days buried on their plots, and it was especially widespread in Ukraine and Belarus, where German occupation and/or Soviet suppression of local independence movements was particularly brutal, and guerrilla warfare was widespread. People still occasionally dig out that stuff by accident even today.
As a general resource, Wikipedia is not a bad place to start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_jokes
Political jokes are the best (because they’re the most subtle, for obvious reasons…), and are so numerous that they get their own category – but you often need to know the historical background to understand them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_political_jokes
I was told this joke by a Bundeswehr soldier as an example, while we were talking about the differences between American & German humor.
An old man lures & kidnaps a little boy, and marches him into the deepest, darkest woods. For miles they walk; it starts getting very dark, and the old man has no flashlight. When the last daylight disappears, the boy starts crying heavily. After 30 minutes of this, the old man angrily stops and admonishes the kid; “I don’t know why you’re so scared, I’m the one who has to walk back alone in the dark!”
“As you’d expect, these jokes aren’t really jokes. It’s not uncommon for old people to have firearms from WW2 days buried on their plots,…”
It’s more common here in the US than many people realize.
The economic collapse and the resulting Great Depression (1929-39) led quite a few folks to burying money-valuables. Humanity in general seems to have a tendency to rat-hole stuff.
Someone I knew years back was involved with a home remodeling of an old house in the late 1960’s when they came across a Thompson SMG buried in a wall.
There’s a good reason sophisticated metal detectors are still sold today…
from bulgakov’s “master and margarita”:
“second-grade-fresh-sturgeon.”
Russians have the best humor. It’s brutal, dry and evocative of the sensation that today can and probably will be worse than yesterday. Here’s my favorite:
Three women are chatting, a French, an American and a Russian.
The French says: “After we got married, I told my husband right away that I was not going to cook, do dishes and laundry or clean the house. He disappeared, I didn’t see him for a day, two, three, then he came back with a housemaid. Now she does all that, and I just sit and relax all day long.”
The American says: “Well, after we got married, I told my husband the same. Didn’t see him for a day, two, three, then he came back with some big appliance. Now it does all that automatically, and I just sit and relax all day long.”
The Russian says: “After we got married, I told my husband that I wouldn’t do all that either. I didn’t see him for a day, two, three. On the fourth day I was finally able to see something with my right eye.”
>> It’s brutal, dry and evocative of the sensation that today can and probably will be worse than yesterday.
Russians are optimists. That is to say:
A pessimist is a guy who, witnessing the events around them today, says “We’re well and truly fucked. It can’t possibly be any worse than this!”.
Whereas an optimist is a guy who, in the same situation, smiles and says “Oh, we’re fucked alright, but it can definitely be way worse – and it will be!”
A different take on this, originally from early 90s (but also very applicable in the past couple of years):
Russian optimists study English.
Russian pessimists study Chinese.
Russian realists study AK.
(China is viewed as a constant background military invasion threat due to a huge land border, historical claims on lands in Russian Far East and Siberia, past history of border conflicts such as Damansky Island, and the relatively weakened state of Russian military compared to USSR.)
Two East German border guards are manning a gated road at the border with Poland. A pickup truck approaches, in the cab are two Poles who are smuggling a Pig into Germany, so the pig is disguised with a handkerchief over it’s head and and a shirt. After inspecting the truck, the German guards wave the truck through the gate. As it drives off, one guard comments to the other, “why is it whenever you see a good looking Polish woman, she is always with two men?”.
A similar US variant is a true story of Olympic legend Jesse Owens in his later years attending an event surrounded by a bunch of old rich white guy’s telling “when I was a kid we were so poor” stories. After hearing a few of their hard luck tales Jesse responded, “man that ain’t nothing, when I was a kid we were so poor that if I didn’t wake up on Christmas morning with a hard on I didn’t have nothing to play with”.
Double whaaa?
What country are they from? Oh right, that’s a big NOPE!
Right? I mean, why have a love affair with a product from there?
I could understand if it were some super awesome fun that cost little, but it’s a recalled piece of dogware.
Plenty of other pistols you could buy and send back, Robert, without giving your dollars to the UAE.
If you’re into irony, Caracal pistols and rifles are just the ticket for shooting Islamic terrorists. Add some Israeli ammo and the circle of irony is complete.
Don’t forget the bacon fat laced gun lube to complete the look.
Ha!
“Longtime readers know I had a major thing with Caracal’s pistols. Limbo-low bore axis,…”
Please.
That honor goes to Chiappa and their ‘Rhino’ .357…
Why’d that fella in the baseball cap with the ebr take Jeb Bush hostage?
Oh please… that HAS TO BE Jiminy Glick!
http://resound.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c074953ef0115708b1087970b-pi
New Caracal Pistol – Might need to check it out
New AR- Meh…
New Bolt gun – I’ll take two!
Wilcox is a company that makes lots of super secret squirrel gear for SOCOM. Dive boards for SEALs, self contained NBC warfare rigs, titanium ladders, NVG mounts, etc. Basically – if SOCOM needs super specialized, one-off bits of kit, they call Wilcox.
When H&K wanted to get contract with the HK45, and bring their MR556 rifles to the US market, they called their friends at Wilcox to be the American factory to make the required parts and screw them together in order to meet the requirements around imports.
Now, this. They had the Fusion Rail business kicking around the website for *years,* and it sounds like they got themselves a fat stack of oil oligarch cash to push it forward.
At least their pistols had some unique features that some people seem to have liked (in addition to the “going off when dropped” and “exploding in your hand” features that were included for free), but who’s going to buy an AR from this outfit? It’s not like there aren’t a hundred other companies making ARs, and most of them don’t have Caracal’s sketchy history and problematic national origin. Maybe they would have been better off trying to just get one pistol to market that wasn’t a danger to its owner, and work up from there.
“Frame issues” translates to broken frames.
Kinda like saying “Mideast issues” describing a region devolving into nuclear war.
At least this lame ass topic segues into discussing Taurus and their complete refusal to take back their Milleniums under the “Cartersettlement recall.”
Selling Arms is a multi-billion dollar industry. The main players are Governments. The Emirates wants to diversify their Industrial base to get away from just Oil. The UAE wants to build their own organic arms business. Caracal is the foundation of that business.
The US Government wants Caracal to be successful because it will provide a non-US based, US friendly arms dealing industrial base which can be an instrument of US policy without having any of that embarrassing End User Certificate business, or things like Congressional investigations to worry about.
The largest free-market consumer of small arms is the US. So if Caracal can make money on a couple of fronts and provide Caracal with plausible reasons to ship container loads of weapons onto ships, than it’s a win-win.
I’ve lived in the UAE, when they decide to do something, they do it right. It may take a couple of false starts, but they will get it right eventually.
“I’ve lived in the UAE, when they decide to do something, they do it right. It may take a couple of false starts, but they will get it right eventually.”
They do that by buying the best available expertise, wherever in the world it is.
That’s likely how *you* came to live in the UAE… 🙂
The UAE is another Muslim shithole, with all which that entails. Flogging, stoning are among the official punishments under Sharia Law. Not to mention their insatiable thirst for 3rd world prostitutes-against-their-will.
This is a sub-third-world dump – apostasy carries a death sentence. These are, at best, filthy animals, not “people” that you want to have on your side. Because they are not. Ever.
Seriously, learn who your cultural enemies are.
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