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Originally Posted by Archie
A 'carbine' is a rather vague term.
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Originally Posted by jmr40
The rifle vs carbine debate is even less clear. Generally if a rifle is made with different barrel lengths the shorter version is a carbine. But it can get complex.
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And just to make matters worse, there's a
third intermediate class- the "short rifle"- although this term seems to have fallen out of common military usage by WWII.
I prefer to compare the terms "rifle", "short rifle", and "carbine" to another set of military terms with vague and varying meanings- the naval vessels "cruiser", "frigate", and "destroyer". Both sets of terms generally refer to diminishing size, but there is maddeningly little consistency in their usage between different countries, or sometimes even by the same country in different time periods.
There simply isn't a settled definition.