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What Is Wrong With This Design?


I own an M1 carbine and happen to like it very much. It’s easy to handle, accurate, and reliable. But it has one design feature that gives me pause. See if you can figure out what it is.

This was written by Mark Grimsley. Posted on Saturday, April 14, 2007, at 7:00 am. Filed under The Profession of Arms. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

7 Comments

  1. Total wrote:

    It doesn’t have a stylish under-barrel grenade launcher?

    Saturday, April 14, 2007 at 9:04 am | Permalink
  2. Mark Grimsley wrote:

    Nope. Guess again.

    Saturday, April 14, 2007 at 9:15 am | Permalink
  3. Total wrote:

    “Nope. Guess again.”

    It does not fire armor piercing fin stablized discarding sabot rounds that will penetrate the front armor of a King Tiger?

    Saturday, April 14, 2007 at 8:04 pm | Permalink
  4. Drew W wrote:

    I don’t see how dropping the mag when you’re trying to flick off the safety is a big problem :-)

    I bet guys with thick winter gloves on did it more than once. Hopefully not at the Chosin Reservoir…

    For some reason, I’ve always liked the look of that rifle more than all the others.

    Saturday, April 14, 2007 at 8:55 pm | Permalink
  5. Mark G. wrote:

    And we have a winner! :-)

    Sunday, April 15, 2007 at 12:12 pm | Permalink
  6. Gavin Robinson wrote:

    This is another aspect of reality that you don’t see in computer games: all the guns just work without any problems.

    Monday, April 16, 2007 at 8:48 am | Permalink
  7. John wrote:

    That carbine is an early-model WW2 weapon which did indeed cause the sometimes-deadly problem indicated. It was quickly replaced with a model which had a flipswith for the safety. Whoever thought it accurate must have been shooting targets at 50 feet. It was intended to replace the old .45 automatic which was even-less accurate.

    Wednesday, May 9, 2007 at 10:43 am | Permalink