I own an Automag III in .30 Carbine. It is a real hoot to shoot and always draws a crowd at the range. The muzzle blast is awesome!
I have a Ruger Blackhawk in .30 carbine.It’s a decent handgun for woodchucks.
I got a great buy on a new Ruger single action in .30 carbine around 1986 in Dodge City, KS. It was acceptable as far as accuracy and probably power were concerned but it had a terrible muzzle blast and was really loud.
I sold it to a fellow employee who actually liked it. Probably should have looked at reloads to tame that blast.
My Father who carried a Garand in WWII said everyone wanted a carbine but they were not allowed to have them.
Dad has some sort of “rolling block” pistol that shoots .30 carbine. Not sure of the model or name though. It’s a single shot and the trigger guard is a lever that opens the breech.
The concepts of “rifle cartridge” and “pistol cartridge” have never been static, not even in terms of velocity, bullet mass, and kinetic energy. When the US 30 Carbine cartridge was introduced in 1941, the king of the hill was the 357 Magnum, for which only a few thousand handguns - all revolvers - had been chambered. And the 30 Carbine still produced more than 10 percent more kinetic energy.
Today, factory cartridges like the 454 Casull and 500 S&W produce as much energy as a 30-30; the 460 S&W equals the 308 Winchester.
The military still defines the max effective range of a handgun as 65 ft. Cavalry charges went by the board no later than 1914, and the type of hand-to-hand combat where a handgun might be useful rare. Far better, went military thinking, to equip troops whose job was not front-line infantry assault (some 80 percent of all in uniform, during the Second World War) with an arm of greater effective range than a handgun, but lighter and less powerful than the rifle issued to footsoldiers. Thus the personal defense weapon (PDW) was created.
The handgun’s limited effective range (range within which probability of hit 50 percent is or greater) is due almost entirely to human factors, s it was instantly apparent that the PDW had to take the form of a shoulder arm: a rifle firing a cartridge of less weight and power than the standard rifle round.
Armsmakers had for generations prior to WWII been developing composite small arms, where a shoulder stock was attached to a handgun. Samuel Colt made and sold attachable stocks for his military revolvers in the 1850s. The first semiauto pistols, hitting the market in the 1890s, were equipped with stocks and touted as ultra-long-range guns. The Borchardt pistol and its better-engineered variant, the widely known “Luger,” both had stocks. Mauser’s C96 “Broomhandle” was given a stock that was hollowed out to do double duty as a holster, and given sights graduated to over 800 meters. FN’s P35, better know today as the “High Power”, was produced in a shoulder-stock version and equipped with long range sights.
When the US War Dept Ordnance Corps made public its first request for proposal for a PDW, several US Gunmakers responded with handgun variants. Colt’s put together a Government Model variant with a long barrel, extended magazine, and an attached stock.
Attempts to modify existing weapons came to naught because the Ordnance Corps insisted on simplicity of maintenance and ease of manufacturing (good ideas, as it turned out). All the handgun adaptations lost out because all were based on designs and production technology of at least two generations earlier, results were costly, slow and tougher to fix.
Some have claimed the the US 30 Carbine was an assault rifle, but that is not the case. Every time it was pressed into such a role results were pretty poor. Cartridge historians have noted that its max pressure standard is remarkably mild; if the upper limit had been permitted to equal typical rifle rounds of the 1920s, kinetic energy would have been much higher and our respect for it that much greater (see the reference book _Cartridges of the World_).
The life of the 30 Carbine Cartridge in the civilian world has been lackluster at best; the sole justification for the round in non-military use was the availability of inexpensive surplus ammunition, which ceased to be a factor decades ago.
Some users hoped a gunmaker would produce a companion handgun to fire the same ammunition as the military surplus rifles, or commercial offshoots, but results have been very spotty. It is possible to develop accurate loads for Ruger’s 30 Carbine Blackhawk, but results when they are fired in an actual Carbine are not very encouraging. And if one loads MIL STD rounds into a Blackhawk, the bullets won’t slip forward because they are cemented in, but the accuracy is terrible, and blast & flash are frightening.
AMT did produce some innovative guns, but hardly any of them were reliable or durable. Their 30 Carbine autoloader was a perfect example.
Marlin did offer its Model 62 lever action rifle in 30 Carbine and some other centerfire calibers (256 Win was one), but the production run was short, and it cannot be considered anything more than a collector’s item today. Some specialized single-shot rifles and the swap barrel for Thompson-Center’s Contender pistol just about complete the rest of the story.
Carbine ping.
“The idea was these men were not supposed to fight with small arms, but “just in case” needed a weapon to protect themselves “
Why would you give a guy a crap gun for “emergencies” when, in an emergency, he would desperately need it to work right ?
Hmmmmm.....been reloading a long time....never seen a .30 Carbine, .357, .41 Mag, or .44 mag that were the same case length....somebody sold me an inaccurate caliber....God Damn them to Hell!!
The only positive thing I can say about the gun and cartridge is that it held more cartridges. had more velocity with a better trajectory than any .22 LR rimfire gun at that time.
It served its original, intended purpose very well. Any center fire carbine or rifle is better suited to combat than any pistol.
Period. To me, the M1 Carbine has many of the same characteristics and deficits as the Marlin Camp Carbine chambered for the 9mm Luger chambering. Both are a lot of fun to shoot but greatly deficient for any serious work.
It has never been a good idea to chamber rifles with pistol cartridges or pistols with rifle cartridges.