New from Taurus: CT9/CT40 Carbine. Again.

don’t get the “few if any carbines take +P” comment. Hi points are cheap and easy to find these days, and all models are rated for a steady diet of +P. Which makes sense, as it’s in +P that you get the most noticeable jump in velocity in a carbine- particularly in 9mm.

I have only investigated 9mm so no idea about .40 S&W.

I can’t find the source for this now, but it is a well-known thing on KTOG. I believe a few people have phoned them and asked? You could try phone/email, too.

Looking at the manual, it does in fact mention +P on the ballistics chart for the gun – and does not say anything about not shooting +P. I suppose that could count as a tacit endorsement. I know that a lot of people pretty much only use +P in their Subs with no trouble.

It’s hardly worth the trouble, even considering other contents of my car emergency bag (and ignoring the contents of my pockets – I pocket carry). There are over 50 of them on GunBroker right now, selling for less than I’ve paid for mine, because I needed an S&W version, not the most common Glock 17 one.

How significant is the difficulty, really? Russians have been making semi-autos shooting a rimmed cartridge – 7.62x54R – for a long time now. Yes, this usually means sticking to a single-stack magazine, but you can still fit 10 rounds in a reasonably sized one, as is the case for SVD and PSL. For an example specifically with .357 Magnum, see Coonan Magnum.

Wouldn’t M1 Carbine be the best in that category then? I realize it’s not quite “pistol caliber”, but it’s closer to that (modern heavy .357 Mag loads in particular) than to a full-fledged rifle, and also similar in terms of size & weight.

Damn! I have a CZ75 and when I bought a S2K I went with a glock version since I didnt have any of the other styles and a Glock got me 33rd capability. That would have been a hard decision if I had known your little tidbit of info. Oh well.

First of all, I was not “making a case” – merely pointing out the inaccuracies. Since, apparently, I might as well make a case at this point, mine would be that PCCs have a useful niche (I own one precisely for this reason), but that niche is not quite as broad as you claim.

>> Partially correct. A round picks up more like 20 ft/sec per additional inch of barrel. Going from a 4-4.5″ handgun to a 16″ carbine would give you more like 230 ft/sec at the muzzle. Your basic 115gr 9mm leaps out at approx. 1,225 ft/sec yielding approx. ft.lbs. Bumping up to 1,455 from a 16″ barrel drives muzzle energy up closer to a not-at-all-insignificant 541 ft.lbs. That exceeds the boost from +P in the same caliber and actually approaches some .357MAG performance, were they fired from the corresponding handgun.

That is way too simplistic. In practice, the increase is only linear on increases that are not too big, and when both measurement points are far enough from the optimal barrel length. If you keep increasing the barrel length, the velocity increases will grow smaller with every inch, peak at some point, and then will actually start to decrease. This effect is harder to observe for typical rifle calibers as for them that peak length is pretty long, but for pistol calibers it’s surprisingly short. Have a look at tables at BBTI – they clearly show how the peak is somewhere around 15-16″ for both 9mm and .45. And when you’re close to that peak, the differences become so small that they fall under the margin of error in many cases.

This is reflected in real world weapons, too – how many SMGs and such do you know with 16″ barrels? Most of them have barrels under 10″.The only reason why we have 16″ in our PCCs is to conform to NFA requirements.

>> Ummm…..sorry, you don’t get to disagree, then agree, and claim you’re correct. The Glock magazine angle alone is enough in itself to prove the point, as so many PCC’s accept them (Thureon Defense, ATI Just Right, Lone Wolf lowers, Kel-Tec Sub2000, and KRISS.) Even Glock themselves are finally supposed to be offering a carbine in 2014. A 9mm handgun, depending on size, of course, will typically (not “always true”) have a mag capacity of 7 up to 17 rounds. Most manufacturers’ handguns use proprietary magazines, not Glocks, and hi-cap versions aren’t available. So going to a Glock-compatible PCC opens the door to 32/33 rd 9mm mags or 25 rd .45ACP mags. On the rimmed cartridge side, your basic .357/.38SPL lever action carbine holds 8 rds, as opposed to the typical corresponding handgun holding just 6. Soooo………

I don’t see the reason why we should compare some unspecified “average handgun” with a specific PCC that takes Glock mags. It should rather be compared to a Glock. Furthermore, there are many other handguns which take extended mags – Beretta 92 and PX4, CZ-75, various S&Ws. And there are PCCs which take all these, as well.

Simply put, since PCCs use pistol mags, they by definition cannot claim higher mag capacity. It’s literally the same mags if you’re comparing apples to apples.

>> Not sure what you mean here. A loaded 9mm PCC typically comes in about a pound or more less than a loaded AR-15. You have to compare the entire weapons systems to each other, not cherry picked individual components.

I referred to the weight of rounds themselves. For that, there’s no difference. We’ll get to the weight of weapons themselves later.

>> I don’t have to trust you, because I have the experience. Now, in an el cheapo like a Kel-Tec, I’ll grant you just about anything negative you want to say. But in the rest? Nope. Felt recoil is a matter of physics: primarily caliber and weight of the weapon. Caliber is moot since we’re comparing same calibers in handgun vs. PCC; but weight of the weapon is a factor. A Taurus large frame 9mm weighs 28 oz. This Taurus PCC is almost four times that at 6.6 lbs. Consider the recoil is also spread over the butt plate (like a snow shoe), so the felt recoil is lower than the handgun.

It is indeed the matter of physics, but there’s far more at play than merely bullet weight and velocity, and weight of the firearm. Felt recoil is about how your body feels it, not just feet-pounds of force. So the acceleration curve is very important, and can make the same impulse feel very differently. And even the impulse can vary depending on how the gas system of a particular firearm works (e.g. semi-autos recoil less than bolts or revolvers). And then there’s the secondary impulse from the moving parts of the firearm itself, such as when the bolt in a semi-auto stops on its way back – that accounts for a good chunk of AK recoil, for example.

In semi-autos in particular, it is pretty well known that locked breech handguns have less felt recoil than straight blowback ones. Most 9mm and .45 ACP handguns are locked breech (you can’t have bolt heavy enough to do straight blowback in something of that size). Most PCCs are straight blowback.

>> This one’s 6.6 lbs, a basic AR is about 6.9, true, but this as you mention is a particularly hefty PCC compared to its brethren. More telling, is that the 6.9 lb. AR is before attaching a lot of accessories, as owners would be far more likely to do on an AR than on a PCC; given their different duties. So the weight difference in real life would be more substantial, as per my point.

Again, if we’re comparing apples to apples, we should compare an AR that is outfitted similarly to our PCC – no rails and stuff dangling off them. That would give you something closer to 6.5 lbs in AR, actually. And with pencil barrel and lighter furniture you can go all the way down to 6 lbs. And why restrict it to ARs only? As noted, Kel-Tec SU-16 is under 5 lbs, and yet it’s a full-fledged 5.56 rifle.

Sorry, not buying it. When your litany of “pointing out inaccuracies” is itself a collection of inaccuracies, then your post can hardly lay claim to being that, now can it? Coming in with an after-the-fact re-characterization of a post which already discredited itself is, well, hard to look at. I’m not going to lie. You attempted to make a case, and blew it. There’s no shame, other than it persisting in flailing about.

You use this term “broad” to describe my claim. Yet, my claim specifically used the term “narrow” range between handguns and rifles. I don’t think “broad” means what you think it means.

No argument that the increase is not linear. There you go introducing pedantic exactitude on your own when 1.) I never bound myself to that level of precision in my post and 2.) that level of precision does not alter the validity of the conclusion. To wit: I said it picks up “more like” 20 ft/sec per additional. I didn’t say it was exactly 20 ft/sec. nor did I state it was necessarily uniform (linear) along the length of the barrel. Moreover, ultimately what matters is the muzzle velocity, regardless the intermediate rates of acceleration, and that holds true as I stated. So you can nitpick all day and try to move the goal post, but it doesn’t invalidate my post.

My God, if you ask a waiter for a glass of water, do you throw it back in his face if the container is actually plastic and the liquid contains some typical tap water levels of chlorine and fluoride and isn’t laboratory-specific H2O molecules only and nothing else? Please. Over the relevant range, what I stated holds true. If you can imagine a mile long barrel, then OK, I’ll concede that the round won’t increase velocity indefinitely and might actually not even exit that mile long barrel. So there. Any more irrelevant, unrealistic attempts at misdirection, or was that it? Oh, there’s your SMG comment, so apparently there’s more.

Who cares what SMG lengths are? I get your retreaded point about nonlinear acceleration and it’s still irrelevant. Muzzle velocity is the point and you can’t refute it. Parsing acceleration rates inch by inch is a waste of time when the bottom line is, well, the bottom line and that is muzzle velocity. Whether SMG’s are shorter because they’re CQB weapons, or whether carbines are 16.1” because of NFA requirements, has nothing to do with the reality of what muzzle energy at the end of a 16” barrel is. More misdirection……

The rest of this point-by-point countering of your hairsplitting goes beyond boring. It’s obvious you’ve struggled mightily just to put something, *anything*, out there, and none of it offers relevance, let alone rebuttal. So I’m going to cut it off here since it’s late. I’ll let you get the last word in hereafter, claim victory and shut it down. Take care.