These are both intended to be serious defensive tools, and, as such, my initial interest in evaluating them was essentially threefold. The former is Law Tactical’s Gen 3-M Folding Stock Adapter the latter is Pantheon Arms’ Dolos Take-down System. On the other hand, the 7.5″-barreled takedown EVAC was designed for discreet storage within, and rapid assembly from, its included 12″x10″x5″ padded carrying case thanks to a folding arm brace assembly and patent-pending removable handguard/barrel system. The PDW enters the rifle-caliber AR-pistol scene as one of its most diminutive members, a result of its 5.5″ barrel being paired with a quick-deploy Maxim Defense SCW Brace that can be collapsed all the way down to the very end of its proprietary truncated receiver extension. Measuring just 18.75″ while stowed but only 23.50″ with its arm brace fully extended, the seriously compact PDW weighs a mere 5 lbs., 11 ozs. Similar in core operation and sharing nearly identical receiver sets, the two models both offer extreme portability, they just come at the concept from two divergent approaches, differentiating themselves primarily by way of their highly specialized furniture.

But neither the PDW nor the EVAC are your run-of-the-mill AR pistol they take the movement into exciting new directions by offering functionality beyond just a shortened form factor. Springfield Armory was quick to respond to the current trend, striking while the iron was hot by introducing its first Saint pistol back in 2017. Most of the manufacturers that I’ve spoken to confirm that their AR-pistol variants have become among the fastest-moving product segments in their catalogs during recent years-and in some cases it’s by a rather wide margin.

Today, most AR makers offer at least one large-format pistol option and many have entire pistol lines, and at a time when the AR market as a whole is struggling, consumers continue to snatch these pint-size models up in large quantities. Generally speaking, the AR platform has continued to shrink in size since basically the original conception of the AR-10, and that trend has accelerated sharply during the past five years or so. 223 Rem.-chambered Edge pistols, Rifleman reached out to Springfield immediately following their unveiling at SHOT Show 2020 to request a test sample of each. And as an outspoken proponent of explicitly short and light firearms-for both entirely practical and wholly recreational reasons-I’m loving every second of it.

Fresh off the introduction of the Hellcat (the manufacturer’s superb contribution to the budding yet immediately booming micro-compact pistol market), Springfield is pushing the bounds of conventional size constraints yet again in 2020 with the announcement of a trio of exceptionally small and agile additions to its Saint family of AR-platform firearms: the Edge PDW, Edge EVAC and Victor. Heck, even the M1A’s most recent new model is the relatively abridged 16″-barreled Tanker. It’s almost as if owner and CEO Dennis Reese walked into a Springfield Armory product strategy meeting at some point in 2018 and decreed, “I want you to make everything smaller!”-because much of the company’s design focus since right about that time has been on compactification.

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