Got AR? Not if you live in Canada, you don’t. Or you won’t for long, because the federal government is requiring citizens to hand their registered ARs in, a move that’s been in the works since the gun bans of early 2020. But since Canadians still like firearms even if their government doesn’t, they’ve looked at other options, including the made-in-Turkey AKDAS Alcor rifle—and now Kodiak Defence is working on parts to make it better-suited for tactical work.
Blame Canada @ TFB:
Kodiak Defence was known for an innovative approach to manufacturing tactical firearms over the past decade or so. That innovation was required to work around Canadian red tape, and Kodiak was pretty good at it. Their in-house projects included the SKS-15, a mashup of an SKS and an AR with the help of Kodiak’s custom-built chassis. They also built an AR-180B clone (like every other Canadian firearms manufacturer), and imported semi-auto Vz.58-pattern rifles. And, they also had a homebrewed PCC, the K9. But then the Canadian federal government banned most semi-auto centerfire rifles, including a lot of Kodiak’s lineup. What were they going to do?
Kodiak Defence went back to the drawing board and looked carefully at the AKDAS Alcor rifle. This semi-auto was imported to Canada as a non-restricted firearm and marketed specifically as a hunting rifle, to appease regulators. But what if you threw a bunch of parts on it—a forend, an AR stock adapter, a grip?
Kodiak’s website doesn’t list any such parts yet; all they have is the AKDAS Alcor rifle itself, listed at $1,499 CAD (about $1,100 USD). But at SHOT, they had a couple of those rifles on display, all pimped out with tacticool parts, as you can see by the photos here.
You can already buy similar parts from other manufacturers, but they’re still not exactly mainstream, just as the Alcor rifle itself is still fairly rare right now (you can find some YouTube reviews, but there’s very little information on the gun). Kodiak could continue to mine their niche market of Canada-legal products, and no doubt find overseas buyers as well if the Alcor proves reliable and popular. But if the Canadian feds ban the rifle, as they banned the similar-looking Mini 14? That will make business a lot more challenging.