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I'm going to say something controversial and suggest there is absolutely a niche for a short barreled folding stock rifle (legally required to identify itself as a handgun with a Disability Brace), with a (integral?) suppressor, a sub/supersonic cartridge, and a good optic for easy holdover.
Small enough to fold into a gym bag or use from a car. Far zero of around 100m for shots up to 125-150m, only halfway decent mechanical accuracy required. Maybe stick a little bipod on it for firing from a window sill or van.
It honestly wouldn't be an awful general purpose carbine either. People underestimate the importance of short, handy hearing-safe guns for home defense.
In a world where most high value targets are surrounded by drones in an environment full of shot-spotters, your choices are a) full kamikaze, b) car bomb, c) mortars, d) American Sniper 360 noscope, or E) stealthy mid-range shooting with an escape plan.
E is going to be the most practical option I should think. But if people get angry enough, option A of whipping out a giggle switch Glock and dumping the mag is going to be pretty popular too.
But maybe I'm overthinking this and most people are just gonna keep strolling up on a roof and wave to the secret service before lobbing a few rounds at the president.
You have, without knowing it, described this gun exactly.
This is the FK Brno PSD. There was a more expensive metal-framed version of this some time ago but this is the more reasonably-priced one.
It fires a modernized version of .30 Carbine (7.5FK performs on par with it; it's just a smaller case so it actually fits in the grip, contrast the Automag III) with mechanical accuracy sufficient to take advantage of the 100+ meter effective range of the cartridge. It can defeat IIIA soft body armor. As its parent cartridge is
.30 Remington10mm Auto, powerful subsonic rounds may be used by affixing a second barrel that came standard with the gun. (.40 S&W can be used when expedient.) Unfortunately, this barrel does not come threaded for a suppressor.Comes standard with a sight meant for longer distances but naturally is cut for an optic. Can also use an optional brace, and a bipod may be affixed at any time.
It is, at least allegedly, used by some security services in the Middle East for those reasons- where shooting someone at 100 meters can be defensive. That's a harder sell to the average American because they're generally too busy buying more general-purpose equipment (and high powered pistols in the US are more oriented towards being a way to delete much larger 4-legged animals, as opposed to the 2-legged ones), to the point where most of the sales literature emphasized its alleged similarity to .44 Magnum and being "a good gun for bear defense".
The
objectively correctEastern European gangster version of this is the vz. 61 Skorpion, the ultimate successor to the sawn-off double-barrel shotgun. Trivially suppressable, stock folds over the top, and doesn't need 1000 rounds of practice to use effectively like 9mm full-auto pistols do. .32 ACP is equivalent to a single pellet of #00 buckshot (from a gun that's 1/5th the size of a typical shotgun); you dump half the mag, that's equivalent to one shotshell. As soon as the Fosscad people figure out how to put a forced reset trigger in their printable lower...@ThisIsSin @SteveKirk
...So, uh, is this how the weekly Motte GunGuy threads start? I'm totally in, BTW.
I would read with interest but contribute little of value.
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I know approximately nothing about guns, but doesn't the KelTec Sub CQB (variant of the non-silenced Sub2000) match that description? Or does it not count because it uses a pistol cartridge?
It's pretty close! The big problem is lethality of subsonic ammunition at long ranges, especially pistol cartridge hollow points that are designed for expansion at much closer to their starting muzzle velocity (at typical 0-25 yard handgun ranges)
If you were only going to get a few shots off, the guy probably has an 80-90% chance of surviving (single gunshot wounds are down to 13% fatal, vs 19% for multiple, almost all from handguns ofc). And that's before all the targets start wearing low profile IIIa business suits.
Honestly it might be best to give up on the subsonic requirement outside of a very dense city, especially because the area they need to search for you scales with the range^2 xπ. A 400m shot means a .5 km^2 circle they have to search, vs .03 km^2 for a 100m shot. Pretty huge difference in the number of candidate cars and windows, giving much more time to escape the search area before they narrow it down.
Course, a 400m shot means a much better shooter with a much better rifle. At the very least a skill level that requires buying enough practice ammo to make you light up the map when they check who was in the area. Especially if you're visiting NYC from Idaho, and are already on a terrorist watchlist for asking your school board why "Dr Diddles Yeets The Teat" is in the kindergarten storytime rotation.
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