Pistol caliber carbines are kind of like pet monkeys. Everybody wants one until they give it a little thought and realize all the obvious drawbacks. Using a less effective pistol cartridge in your rifle pretty much defeats the purpose of choosing a rifle for a given task in the first place, right? Well, maybe not. \u00a0PCCs have some obvious advantages and we\u2019ve already looked at a few of them; convenience, low cost of ammo, and the undeniable fun factor. For this final installment of the series on PCCs, I want to highlight an advantage of these rifles that I rarely see mentioned, but which could ultimately lead to a resurgence in their popularity in the near future: PCCs can go places that other rifles cannot.<\/p>
I don\u2019t mean that their compact size allows you to stroll around with one hidden in a violin case (although that is undeniably cool). I\u2019m talking about the fact that the very aspect of PCCs that is their biggest disadvantage, the use of \u201cunderpowered\u201d cartridges, also allows them to be used at almost any shooting range in the country, indoor or outdoor. This might not be a big deal if you\u2019ve got 12 acres of vacant Wyoming wilderness out your back door, but that\u2019s not the case for most shooters today.<\/p>
Once upon a time, the majority of guns in America were owned by folks who had easy access to huge tracts of land on which to shoot these guns. As our nation\u2019s rural landscape has become increasingly more urbanized, it\u2019s become a real pain to find wide open spaces where shooting is safe, legal, and polite. Factor in that the rapidly increasing percentage of the gun-owning public live in major metropolitan areas and it should be no surprise that the 80+ million gun owners in the US often have a hard time finding a place to shoot the 300 million guns that they collectively own.<\/span><\/p> Rifles, in particular, are difficult to accommodate. They\u2019re loud and powerful, which creates some logistical issues for using them on indoor ranges. If you were to take your centerfire rifle into one of the few indoor ranges that actually allow it, you\u2019ll quickly find that the distance you\u2019re able to shoot is a tiny fraction of what the rifle is capable of. That may or may not bother you, but then the overwhelming sound of firing your rifle in a tight enclosed space will likely leave you with a severe headache before you make it through your first box of ammo.<\/span><\/p> <\/p> Shooting outside is much more pleasant, but even outdoor ranges often have restrictions in place that limit the type of shooting allowed with centerfire rifles. I\u2019ve personally encountered outdoor ranges that only allow benchrest shooting, or restrict \u201crapid fire\u201d, or don\u2019t allow shooting on the move, or any other manner of shooting outside of what you\u2019d find in a 1920\u2019s era Boy Scout rifle match. In many regions of the country, precious few, if any, shooting ranges have provisions for rifle owners to regularly practice the kind of marksmanship and rifle handling skills taught in defensive carbine classes or required in action shooting matches. The AR-15 is the most popular rifle in the country right now, and they\u2019re ideally suited for these kinds of dynamic shooting activities, but we\u2019re severely short on places to practice them.<\/span><\/p>