Once you start shooting accurate rifles it becomes a dark road. You start to look at the guns that you’ve accumulated overtime and if they aren’t meeting your accuracy requirements you stop and ask yourself what’s the point. I have an 11.5 BCM that I love but even with stellar ammo it could only do 2 MOA (not indicative of BCM rifles today). I know there’s a lot of people that will say that’s all you need. It Isn’t all you need when you’re spending Black Hills prices on ammo and you’re only getting 2 moa. Not to mention 4 moa with plinking ammo. I eventually did a barrel swap on that upper to a Daniel Defense barrel and it shoots 1.5 moa all day and sub MOA with good ammo.
At this point you might be asking where the hell am I going with all this? The answer is that I concluded that only accurate rifles matter. And when you get into 308, it can either be a shitshow or it could be sub MOA.
Several years back I was doing some side work for someone that was in the industry and they asked if they could pay me with a rifle. I said sure, give me an SR25. That didn’t happen, they got me a SCAR 17. Now the SCAR is a fantastic battle rifle, especially if you throw down for a Geissele trigger and an extended handguard. When I first got the SCAR, I could honestly say I didn’t know what the difference was between a battle rifle and more of a DMR. There were some things that the SCAR did wonderfully and other not so much. On a good day with match ammo, you could do sub MOA but the vast majority of the time it was a 1.5 MOA gun. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. That type of accuracy out of such a light gun was and still is amazing.
During that time, AR10s were not the best reliability wise, especially with a suppressors. The one thing you can say about the SCAR is its reliable. But in recent years that has all changed. AR10s are getting a whole lot better even though there is no spec’d standard like the AR15. The last few iterations of the SR25 have gotten excellent reviews and I always felt jipped on the fact that I got a SCAR instead of a SR25. I never really fell in love with the SCAR and seemed like a lot of cash sitting in the corner of the safe rarely being used.
Well, then, COVID happened. And then the riots in the summer of 2020 happened. Anybody that had been in the gun industry for a while started to look at what was in their gun safe to see if anything they wanted to get rid of. There were no new guns to be had. And used guns were selling for new gun prices if not more. I took the opportunity to ditch the SCAR. I got more than new retail for a well-used gun. I decided to take all that cash, add a little, and get myself more of a precision 308.
There are handful guns in this category that have a history of being accurate and reliable. At the top of the heap is the SR25 APC or PC now, the JP Enterprises LRP-07, Larue OBR, the Larue PredatOBR and the GAP-10. The SR & JP will run you in the high 4k spec ‘ed to your liking. With GAP and Larue being the cheaper of the four in the high 3k to low 4k range. From there you have your second tier with the likes of LMT, Seekins, SIG, S&W, POF, V7, DD, and a bunch I’m sure I’ve forgotten to mention.
I was sitting on a pile of cash and a larger pile of 308 Federal Gold Medal Match that a buddy needed to get rid of selling off his last 308 bolt gun in an effort to fully move over to 6.5. I decided to look at that top tier group. I was looking for a rifle that could fill a DMR role, but also roll into a battle rifle if need be. I quickly took the JP off the table. If you’re just shooting for accuracy, I think it’s the best gun you could get right now. My issue with the JP, is that it is totally proprietary (not that that’s a bad thing but it is what it is), It is also not the most go to war ready rifle. I am not a huge fan of the handguard options compared to the SR – tubular with no M-LOK. It’s more of a gamer rifle that is hyper accurate. But I could see picking one up if I came across it to test it out. At the time the GAP had a crazy backlog due to Covid and it seemed the general consensus is that the industry had moved on and there were better guns for the money. So that left me with the SR and Larue.
I tried long and hard to decide between the two. Larue has an endless backlog with a stellar reputation that seems to peter off data wise around 2014. That’s a long time to not have a lot of reviews. If I was going to go this route, I was going to get a PredatOBR. Everything I had heard was the the OBR was too heavy. There is not a lot of data on the PredatOBR’s exact weight but I figured it had to be on the lighter side of the OBR.
I put in an order for the PredatOBR in November of of 2020 and decided if I ran into an SR25 along the way I would pick one up to see how it shot and handled. Figured I would probably end up with the PredatOBR. After going through this whole process I decided I would do a write up on both as exact data especially on the Larue is hard to find.
Stay tuned…