If you're creating a new page for an anti-materiel rifle make sure to add [[Category:Gun]], [[Category:Rifle]] and [[Category:Anti-Materiel Rifle]] to the page so that it will be listed here.

An anti-materiel rifle is a large-caliber rifle designed for use against armored vehicles, ordnance, fortifications, and/or other forms of equipment, generally through the use of large-caliber, high-velocity rounds with armor-piercing projectiles. Originally meant specifically for use against tanks (with the first such weapon being the Mauser 1918 T-Gewehr), advances in tank armor quickly outpaced the effectiveness of anti-tank rifles, to the point where any weapon sufficiently powerful to pierce one's armor would be far too large, and recoil far too harshly, to be suitable as an individual weapon; as such, their roles would ultimately be confined to dealing with equipment too well-protected for normal rifles, yet not sufficiently armored to necessitate larger crew-served and/or recoilless weapons.

There are two general qualifiers for an anti-materiel rifle as defined on this wiki:

(a) It fires a purpose-designed anti-materiel cartridge

(i) While many modern AMRs are intended first and foremost as long-range sniper rifles (e.g. the McMillan TAC-50), the cartridges they fire still allow them to be used effectively in an anti-materiel role, allowing them to fit into both categories; note that, contrary to common belief, not all AMRs are intended as (nor suitable as) sniper rifles, with earlier anti-tank rifles in particular being neither exceptionally accurate nor designed to accept scopes (not leastly because period scopes would not respond well at all to the recoil they produce). The "purpose-designed" bit is largely to exclude large-caliber sporting/hunting rifles that were never intended for use against armored targets, even if they can, in some cases, be used in this role (as was the case during World War I, when the British purchased several commercial big-game hunting rifles as a stop-gap measure against German sniper shields).

(b) It is a rifle

(i) This qualifier excludes larger crew-served weapons, including light AT cannons and heavy machine guns; while an AMR can theoretically be select-fire (though there is precious little reason for one to be), it must be a shoulder-fired weapon, capable of at least theoretically being operated by a single individual (though in practice they were often carried and run by two-man crews, largely due to their considerable weight), with a caliber generally no more than 20mm (the broadly-accepted dividing line between rifles and cannons, though some exceptions (e.g. the Barrett XM109) exist). This limit also excludes recoilless rifles such as the M18, whose bore size makes them, for all practical purposes, recoilless rifled cannons; due to their similar role and function, these can be found in Category:Missile Launcher (though it is worth noting that proper anti-materiel rifles can have similar recoil-compensating systems, as is the case with the Croatian RT-20). Additionally, this limit excludes handguns chambered for anti-materiel cartridges (e.g. the Triple Action Thunder), and large-caliber shotguns intended for/used in an anti-materiel role (e.g. the Ithaca Mag-10 "RoadBlocker").

As a final note, the correct spelling is "anti-materiel", not "anti-material"; "materiel" specifically denotes military supplies and equipment, while any rifle intended to be used against a target made of physical matter could be argued to be an "anti-material rifle".

Anti-Materiel Rifles