Category talk:Carbine

This firearm category is too inclusive and should be removed.

I brought this up on the forum earlier, but I'll put it here as well. The term "carbine" is just too broad, because it refers solely to a firearm's barrel length (depending on if it's longer or shorter than usual), not the cartridge type it uses, nor the firing modes it has, etc. As such, there can be pistol-caliber carbines (a designation appropriate only when a handgun-cartridge-firing weapon has a barrel length too long for a handgun, and is incapable of fully automatic fire or is not select-fire, such as the CX4 Storm), assault rifle carbines, battle rifle carbines, etc. It would be much easier to say "X is a carbine-length variant of Y firearm" instead on the appropriate page entries.

There are next to no "dedicated carbines" that are either unavailable in a longer barrel length, or are unavailable in a select-fire/fully automatic firing configuration. The M1 Carbine has the select-fire M2 Carbine variant, which makes it a submachine gun or an assault rifle carbine (depending on how you classify the .30 Carbine cartridge). The CX4 Storm recently had a select-fire variant made available by Beretta, called the MX4 Storm, making it a submachine gun. That about leaves the De Lisle carbine as the sole "dedicated" carbine on this website, to my knowledge, which would be too small to warrant a new category.

I noticed the Personal Defense Weapon category was removed recently. I hope the Carbine category is next. --Mazryonh 00:03, 14 January 2012 (CST)