11 Great Pistol Caliber Carbines

By Brad Fitzpatrick

The most obvious reason to own a carbine and a rifle in the same caliber is practicality. If your rifle and your handgun use the same cartridge, that means you’ll only have to track down one type of ammunition to shoot both guns. This is one of the primary reason that famed nineteenth century rifles, like the Winchester 1873, were chambered for cartridges that would also function in the wheelguns of the day. If you’re traveling across the trackless wilderness of the American West on horseback, there’s not a lot of space for additional ammo.

By the early twentieth century, both the American landscape and American firearms had changed. Powerful smokeless cartridges, like the .30-06 Springfield, largely displaced the older, lighter pistol cartridges, which couldn’t match the ballistics of more modern cartridges. Likewise, the pioneering cowboys who rode across the country searching for new grazing land and who spent months at a time on the trail were largely gone, so the value of the dual-purpose cartridge faded in the face of modern weapons and a more sedentary lifestyle.

But that doesn’t mean that pistol-caliber carbines are a thing of the past. In fact, there are a lot of reasons why …read more

Source:: Guns and Ammo