The Honest Outlaw loves pistol caliber carbines. And from my wanderings through gun videos and articles, I have to suppose that he is not alone. At least a number of manufacturers hope so. Call me a contrarian, but I am of mixed opinion on the category.
First off, allow me to review terms here. The word, carbine, goes back to the rise of personal firearms, in the sixteenth century referring to the type of short rifle that light cavalry were known to carry, and this sense of a shortened version of a battle rifle has stayed with the gun. The logic of the carbine, regardless of the cartridge that it is chambered for, is that the reduced overall and barrel length allows fighters so armed to maneuver in and out of vehicles, building, close cover, and whatnot while still having a reasonably powerful primary weapon.
Or not so much, since the PCC has been around for some time, best known in its nineteenth century iteration by the Winchester .44-40 rifle, the gun that won the west—if by west, we mean the part of current U.S. territory on the left side of the Mississippi River, by won, we acknowledge that the more accurate phrasing would be stole from the people who were living there, and the gun, we ignore the various .45 and .50 caliber single-shot rifles that wiped out the buffalo and other wildlife of the region.
Certainly, it was popular at the time to carry a revolver and a rifle that were chambered in the same cartridge. If I were packing for a long walk into the wilderness, I could see the obvious logistical simplification that this creates, especially with the knowledge that the rare trading posts were likely to have boxes of .44-40, say, but might not have less common rounds. And there was not a whole lot of difference between bullets intended for rifles and those meant for handguns. Both were typically a rounded lead slug without jacket or aerodynamic improvements. The propellant was limited in velocities that it could generate, anyway, with bullet mass and diameter being the focus for increase if greater effect was desired.
But we have had spitzer bullets and smokeless powder for well over a century now, facts that have widened the gulf between a handgun and a rifle, making the latter the choice if power and range are important.
All right, but we are living in the era of the assault rifle, which among its other defining characteristics is included an intended range of three to four hundred meters, not the thousand-yard shots that the U.S. Army Ordnance bureaucrats lusted after. And more and more of us are living in cities, rendering traditional battle rifle cartridges excessively dangerous in an urban setting.
And yet, perhaps the PCC is not entirely without merit. In .45 ACP firearms, for example, there is a small, but not negligible increase in velocity as the barrel lengthens, roughly between a two and four hundred feet per second gain, depending on bullet weight and propellant loading, as the distance for the powder to burn grows from two to eighteen inches. How much that is useful is difficult to say, given the vagaries of ballistics, but perhaps a hollow point round will open better or penetrate farther—the problem with the latter always being the number of inches that are enough, but not too much.
It is also true that for many people, a rifle—i.e., a weapon held with two hands and anchored into one’s shoulder—is easier to use accurately than is a handgun. The extra point of contact and the longer radius between the front and rear sights makes for better control during aiming and recoil, and the greater weight softens the impact of the latter. And while the .223/5.56 round often used in an AR-15 is somewhat safer for bystanders, thanks to the bullet’s propensity to tumble upon entering a target, the sound volume for an AR-15, especially in carbine length, is very much higher than the blast from a weapon firing a pistol cartridge.
All of that being said, the PCC does have one huge flaw when compared with the handgun whose magazines it can share or with the rifle that it is trying to be: price. Take any handgun and PCC in the same chambering. Buyers will often be able to get two or three of the former, along with a box of ammunition, for what the latter costs. (Yes, I know about the Kel-Tec SUB2000. I did say often, not always.) Handgun brands with a long history of reliability are readily available in the $500 to $700 range, and several new companies—or old companies with budget models—have offerings for only a bit over $300. A good AR-15 can be had under $700 as well.
In the nineteenth century pairing of carbine and handgun, the carbine tended to cost more as well, but usually only by a couple of dollars. With modern manufacturing methods, a good PCC should not run much more than a good pistol, all the more so because the technology is far from anything new.
There is one area in which the PCC can excel: plinking. This is obviously true with .22 LR rifles, which are in some sense all pistol caliber carbines, but the same can be said about centerfire guns. With a box of cheap 9mm—when that exists—and a PCC, a free afternoon is a joyous time. But I do not keep guns that are not either a pleasure to shoot or that serve some practical purpose. To date, I have not found a need for a PCC, and the price of most of them continues to turn me away from buying what would be merely a fun gun—though I keep my eye open for a deal on a lever-action carbine, since that would have a historical exemption from my frugality.
Now if someone wants to donate a modern PCC to me to make me swallow my words here, I am willing to try the experiment.
I can sort of see the case for a PCC if you're not big into guns, and you just want a handgun for self-defense and a long gun for home defense, and gosh, wouldn't it be nice if you could have just one caliber of ammunition that will work in both? That latter consideration gets undermined a bit by the fact that there are loads that work better in PCCs than in handguns and vice-versa, even in 9x19mm, but I guess it would still be nice if they can share practice ammo and, in a pinch, they can share ammo even if it's not optimal for one or the other.
Still, the PCC is essentially a nerfed SMG, and SMGs have largely been supplanted in military and police use by AR-pattern carbines for a reason.
I've thought about getting a PCC. My brother managed to buy one even though he is in NYS. Probably a neutered version. But I need another gun like I need a hole in the head, not that such logic ever stopped me.
Now, where is that drill?