Following World War II and the establishment of the NATO alliance, there was pressure to adopt a standard rifle, alliance-wide.
The FAL was originally designed to handle intermediate cartridges, but in an attempt to secure US favor for the rifle, the FAL was redesigned to use the newly developed 7.62×51mm NATO cartridge.
The US tested several variants of the FAL to replace the M1 Garand.
These rifles were tested against the T44, essentially an updated version of the basic Garand design.
Despite the T44 and T48 showing performing similarly in trials, the T44 was, for several reasons, selected and the US formally adopted the T44 as the M14 service rifle.

During the late 1980s and 1990s, many countries decommissioned the FAL from their armories and sold them en masse to United States importers as surplus.
The rifles were imported to the United States as fully automatic guns.
Once in the U.S., the FALs were "de-militarized" (upper receiver destroyed) to eliminate the rifles' character as an automatic rifle, as stipulated by the Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA 68 currently prohibits the importation of foreign-made full-automatic rifles prior to the enactment of the Gun Control Act; semiautomatic versions of the same firearm were legal to import until the Semiautomatic Assault Rifle Ban of 1989).
Thousands of the resulting "parts kits" were sold at generally low prices ($90 – $250) to hobbyists.
The hobbyists rebuilt the parts kits to legal and functional semi-automatic rifles on new semi-automatic upper receivers.
FAL rifles are still commercially available from a few domestic firms in semi-auto configuration: Entreprise Arms, DSArms, and Century International Arms.
Century Arms created a semi-automatic version L1A1 with an IMBEL upper receiver and surplus British Enfield inch-pattern parts, while DSArms used Steyr-style metric-pattern FAL designs (this standard-metric difference means the Century Arms and DSArms firearms are not made from fully interchangeable batches of parts).
Following World War II and the establishment of the NATO alliance, there was pressure to adopt a standard rifle, alliance-wide. The FAL was originally designed to handle intermediate cartridges, but in an attempt to secure US favor for the rifle, the FAL was redesigned to use the newly developed 7.62×51mm NATO cartridge. The US tested several variants of the FAL to replace the M1 Garand. These rifles were tested against the T44, essentially an updated version of the basic Garand design. Despite the T44 and T48 showing performing similarly in trials, the T44 was, for several reasons, selected and the US formally adopted the T44 as the M14 service rifle.
During the late 1980s and 1990s, many countries decommissioned the FAL from their armories and sold them en masse to United States importers as surplus. The rifles were imported to the United States as fully automatic guns. Once in the U.S., the FALs were "de-militarized" (upper receiver destroyed) to eliminate the rifles' character as an automatic rifle, as stipulated by the Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA 68 currently prohibits the importation of foreign-made full-automatic rifles prior to the enactment of the Gun Control Act; semiautomatic versions of the same firearm were legal to import until the Semiautomatic Assault Rifle Ban of 1989). Thousands of the resulting "parts kits" were sold at generally low prices ($90 – $250) to hobbyists. The hobbyists rebuilt the parts kits to legal and functional semi-automatic rifles on new semi-automatic upper receivers. FAL rifles are still commercially available from a few domestic firms in semi-auto configuration: Entreprise Arms, DSArms, and Century International Arms. Century Arms created a semi-automatic version L1A1 with an IMBEL upper receiver and surplus British Enfield inch-pattern parts, while DSArms used Steyr-style metric-pattern FAL designs (this standard-metric difference means the Century Arms and DSArms firearms are not made from fully interchangeable batches of parts).
FN FAL