Which was the better rifle?
- Thread starter c4t0o1
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Buffalo Roam
Registered Senior Member
M-1 Garand, Accuracy, and Rate of fire.
I like the Enfield, having only fired a Mauser on one occasion(smooth kick though).
rate of fire.
reasoning:
i assume you want to use this firearm in combat.
for accuracy you need to be an exceptional marksman, of which there are very few around, therefor the kill rate will be low.
for rate of fire all you need to do is move the gun from side to side, which any idiot can do, therefor the kill rate will be higher.
One shot one kill.
What about the M14? Or is it more or less the same rifle as the M1, except with full auto capability?
Bullshit.
Rate of fire is only important in CQB. These weapons saw long range exchanges, you'd be long dead before you got to spray and pray.
Oh, these were not semi-autos btw, so your argument fails there. We are talking tens of aimed shots per minute, not second, using a bolt action rifle, reloaded with a clip system.
See above. Real life is not Counterstrike. A wide, wide majority of combat shooting is done toward a point target at a range from 20-150m. Try a full auto burst at that range and see how many of your rounds land within ten degrees (not minutes) of what you're shooting at. Even for an area target, rate of fire is far from the primary concern. Suppressing fire is taught to be administered while in single shot mode to conserve ammunition. (I'm pretty sure this has always been the case.) We made the move from full auto to three shot trigger groups on almost every battle rifle in the US arsenal for this reason.
Most Garands were chambered in .30-06, the M14 is universally 7.62 NATO. Garands fed from 8-round en bloc clips that had to be dropped through the top when the bolt was open, which gave the Garand user a distinct disadvantage of needing to expend all eight rounds before reloading. The M14 has a 20 round box magazine that can be replaced anytime. The M14, while originally designed for full auto, is nowadays semi only because full auto is completely uncontrollable (and dangerous) due to the 7.62 NATO's muzzle energy.mikenostic said:
The M14 still has a place in today's military. Aside from being the preferred weapon of some designated marksmen and snipers in the Army and Marine Corps, the Navy loves the M14 so much that most ships still carry them in the armory. This is despite the round's ability to penetrate interior bulkheads of steel up to 3/8" thick - standard construction in the fleet nowadays.
It would be a combination of the two.
Ohhhh. Ok. For some reason I thought the M1 and M14 were both 7.62 and just the 1903 Springfield was a 30-06.
My former reserve unit uses de-milled M14s for our color guards.
Have you seen the SOCOM M14/M14 carbine? WOW!
They have a bitchin polymer lower receiver, with a pistol grip type stock. I don't care too much for the curved handle type stock. Pistol grips just feel better.
Yes I have actually. SOCOM armorers build some crazy shit.
While I have never carried a SOPMOD M14 outside the wire, I had the opportunity to fire one at a range a few times overseas. They were similar configs to this one:
With the stock collapsed the LOA is about equal to a MP5SD, maybe an inch longer. With such a short barrel, the muzzle blast is INSANE. I felt literally punch drunk after going through a few magazines in rapid fire and my face was numb from the concussion. Best of all, they had the full auto trigger group. I'm convinced that whoever designed that thing was some kind of masochist.
I'll keep my SOPMOD M4, thankyouverymuch.
edit: gun porn circlejerk up in hur
Buffalo Roam
Registered Senior Member
The only thing better about the M-14 was the 20 round magazine capacity, for a fact to make a M-14 full auto, you had to attach the trip sear, and in most cases the only M-14 that were issued full auto were the M-14-E2, which was modified by the addition of a biopod and a straight line stock with a pistol grip, most M-14 were deployed in the semi auto mode only, recoil at full auto was a bitch, no control at all.
The M-14 still lives on as the M-21, and as the designated marksman rifle, one of which uses the E2 stock, a modification from the 2nd Inf. Div.
Buffalo Roam
Registered Senior Member
Yes I have actually. SOCOM armorers build some crazy shit.
With the stock collapsed the LOA is about equal to a MP5SD, maybe an
inch longer. With such a short barrel, the muzzle blast is INSANE. I felt literally punch drunk after going through a few magazines in rapid fire
and my face was numb from the concussion. Best of all, they had
the full auto trigger group. I'm convinced that whoever designed that
thing was some kind of masochist.
I'll keep my
SOPMOD M4, thankyouverymuch.
edit: gun porn circlejerk up in hur
Have to agree with you Echo, a short barreled major caliber is a
bitch on muzzle blast, and flash, even with extended muzzle brakes,
I grew up in the military with the M-14, my first qualification weapon.
Precision fire is something that the military is learning about all over
again now that the ranges have extended, even in Nam, full auto in
CQB was not effective, you still have to pick a target and hit it, and
that requires some kind of sight picture, one of the methods taught
was called quick kill, it was taught with BB guns, you still had to learn
the sight picture to make a hit, with a M-16 on semi auto I could make
25 meter head shot all day long with out the iron sights, but once you
went full-auto that went out the window.
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The first time I fired an M14 I curled the fingers of my left hand up too far around the handguard and my fingertips went into the bolt guide. Next shot I took, the bolt came slamming home onto my fingers, crushing them pretty bad. Classics like the M14 (finger guillotine) and .45 (no firing pin disconnect) were great tools of Darwinism, lemme tell you.
Buffalo Roam
Registered Senior Member
No it teaches you proper rifle handling, and Manuel of arms, I originally learned my Manuel of Arms on my Uncles M-1, they let him keep it when he returned from Europe in 1945, if you weren't careful with the M-1 it would rip your thumb nail right off, or at least chew up your thumb and leave on hell of a blood blister.
But all in all the M-14 is a excellent weapon, good range, great knock down power even with FMJ, good rate of fire, simple, and reliable, easy to maintain, and it keeps its zero.
Did you make the mistake of crawling the stock and getting your thumb shoved up your nose?
That is another classic trick of the M-14.
Buffalo Roam
Registered Senior Member
Pure Bull Shit, not in combat.
Recoil and recovery, bolt operation, reacquire your shooting grip, and target acquisition, sight alignment, breath, hold and fire, and do it all over again, and in combat against moving multiple targets, bull shit, we are not talking on the range here. Now add the fact that some one is shooting back.
The M-14 doing the mad minuet with a trained rifleman can put out 500 rounds in a minuet, but you can't hit jack, but you can do it, now the Lee Enfield was issued with stripper clips full of ammo, 5 round clips, it took two clips to charge the weapon, two separate movement to reload your weapon, the M-14 used a magazine, 20 rounds at a time on movement to reload, once you reloaded all you had to do was reacquire your mount, acquire your sights, acquire the target, breath, and pull the trigger, and site, acquire the target and pull the trigger, but you wouldn't believe just how bad being shot at will mess up your co-ordination, it take a little time to get used to doing your job as a rifleman, that is why they do repetitive training so that it become a drill, and you do it with out thinking, but still when someone is shooting back it really messes with the accuracy.
Buffalo Roam
Registered Senior Member
Under that situation it is possible with a M-14 to do 150 aimed shots, but we are talking combat rifles, used for what they were intended, not target shooting on the range, I did this as part of my job in the Military, I am a retired Platoon Sergeant, and part of my responsibility was marksmanship training, I know all of these weapons inside out, the Smelly was and is a great combat gun for the last century, but even the British abandoned it by 1950, went to the FAL, a contemporary of the M-14.
If you want something impressive, I could set up a M-60 and fire 750 rounds in a minuet into a E type silhouette, at 500 yards and have one ragged hole about the size of a saucer, but that doesn't make the M-60 a good combat rifle.