A Magpul PDRc
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Chambered in 9x39mm (I guess .300 Whisper would also work, but I like the idea of a heavier bullet)
And toss a suppressor on the whole thing to quiet it down.
There you would have a compact gun for a VAST number of applications. From personal defense and VIP defense, to home defense, to a farm gun or truck gun, to just a fun range gun, all the way to with proper bullet selection, I’d totally use this for close-range white tail deer hunting.
And the subsonic ammunition with the suppressor, that would be a DAMN fun range gun! And unless I’m missing something either cambering could be be accomplished by simply swapping out magazine, barrel, and maybe the action spring.
Just some gun-geekery musings
**Oh on a side note, this whole idea will never get off the ground because
#1. Magpul only made a few prototypes of this gun and they likely won’t make more because
#2. There’s really no way to make this gun NFA legal and still have any advantages.
The NFA sucks!
(1) Needs a 16 inch barrel for us civilians.
(2) Extend the polymer lower, get rid of the P90 grip, and put a picatinny rail on it so I can put whatever foregrip I want on it where I want it.
(3) Profit?
I disagree that making it NFA legal will kill it. Current military trends toward shorter barrels aside, 5.56 needs barrel length to get performance. Bullpup gets you that in a small package with the minimum allowable OAL. This is a good thing for a largely urban population.
The real issue is the price they bring to market. If it’s a $1k gun they might have something. If it’s $2k they’re going to niche market themselves. If it’s more than that nobody other than a few gun snobs will buy it. This thing might be great, but it ain’t worth 2 good ARs to me.
Well IIRC when I first saw this, even a 16″ BBL (Which would only require a 4-6″ extention, no biggie) it would still be under the NFA Minimum OAL of 26″ tho Over here:
http://www.defensereview.com/defrev-exclusive-magpul-pdr-personal-defense-rifle-556-pdw-photos/
It looks like the larger version with a 16″-18″ BBL might fit the bill just fine.
an 18″ BBL is plenty for 5.56x45mm, and decent for even 7.62×51. Still I like the idea of 9x39mm or .300 Whisper better for a gun built like this.
Actually, 18″ is better for 7.62x51mm than 5.56mm!
That’s why they felt they could stick an 18″ barrel on the MK 48 GPMG, and still keep the same effective range.
Meh, if you like it, just figure an extra $250 on the purchase price and an additional 4-8 month wait. Going to a longer barrel to meet length rules would take away the biggest benefit to a short gun like that.
But firing a 12″ barrel .223 in a car? ouch! A supressor sure would take the edge off (but now adds length AND weight)
Yeah that’s my gripe. Seems with the slightly longer package you can still keep the gun handy and NFA legal, but it shines better in the SMALL package.
And also for such a small gun I’d at least like SOME sort of suppressor can on it, and hence why I thought it would be kickass in 9x39mm. Plus I just think there needs to be MORE 9x39mm guns in the world!
Going to show my newbie stripes here and ask a few questions.
Can we have a 9x39mm pistol with a barrel longer then the barrel on the PDRc?
In states where the “high capacity” magazine is legal in a rifle, do any limit the capacity of a pistol magazine?
I don’t get it at all.
I could, if I could find a holster and belt arrangement, carry a Desert Eagle .50 caliber right?
So, why does it make sense (I know, I know, I expect logic, reason and sanity from our government –hopelessly) that we can’t carry a short barreled rifle?
I should do a whole post on that. But short answer, yep, you could buy one of these
http://riflegear.com/showproduct.aspx?ProductID=776&SEName=draco-ak-pistol-762×39
And its treated no differently than any other pistol you might buy. You could convert it to 9x39mm if that was what you wanted, ect ect. But add a shoulder stock to it, and BOOM felony unless you do the NFA paperwork and pay the $200 tax.
the reason why the PDR is an issue is that being bullpup the shoulder-stock part of the gun can’t really be removed, so it will always be a “Shoulder fired weapon” in the eyes of the ever-stupid BATFE.
But just ask Thomas how easy it is to get a 5.56x45mm pistol the same size as the PDR shooting the same round!
One thing about the pistols, though, to use them accurately it really helps to sling them in a tension style like the normal school of MP-5 shooting, without a sling it’s a lot harder to be surgical. Of course, on close quarters that’s somewhat academic, but you can miss an entire human at ten feet or less in a gunfight. It’s happened more than once in history.
Just a thought on rifle caliber Tactical pistols vs my rifle caliber target and hunting pistols. Slings really do make a difference. Combine that with using the magazine as a LEGAL VFG, and they can be tack drivers.
Oh, if you had a short barreled rifle, you could conceal it under your trenchcoat. . . . Which is actually legal in a surprising number of states.
Pistol barrel length is unregulated. 4″ barrel or 24″ barrel? No difference as long as it is designed to be fired one handed.
Under some local AWBs, handguns are limited to a maximum weight of ~50oz – so d’eagles are verbotten and AR-based pistols have a lot of weight-reducing slots.
I realize the $200 tax is stiff, but a short barreled rifle is pretty damn handy… I own a couple and plan on a couple more. IMHO, it is worth the extra money. Not that I enjoy paying to register an otherwise-legal pile of parts, but you do get a little something for the cash.
Oh I know, I’ve SHOT several of your bitchen SBRs. Still I’m always curious where the tradeoff in SBRs are. At what point is it better to be simply shooting a pistol caliber out of a short barrel rather than a rifle round?
I have similar thoughts when I wonder what the difference between my pocket .38 and Jay’s .357 Snubbie. At what point do you shrink the barrel so much that you’re just making a lot of bright light and noise rather than shoving that bullet downrange?
Chron will tell you.
My 15.5″ barrel .375 spits 235 grainers at a bit under 3,000fps all day long with the right loads and .375H&H wasn’t exactly designed as a pistol round. My 15.5″ .223AckImp barrel is down about 400fps over the 24″ rifle version with the same loads, but you can play with powders to compensate, and then as you get longer, you hit the tipping point where you start losing MV by extending the barrel…With commercial loadings, there’s pretty simple answers that if you are outside of the range of normalcy of barrel length for caliber your performance will suffer. With hand loads, a lot of that can be gained back by higher pressures and faster powder, provided the firearm is strong enough to allow for that.
Heh, there are always tradeoffs. Disclaimer : I really like odd stuff.
I’m a huge fan of the .357sig, for example. A 124 grain bullet at about 1325-1350pfs out of a full size pistol. Got chatting with a buddy today about a 357sig carbine, and I found an article about someone building one on an AR platform with a 16″ barrel. Using factory 124gr loads, he was pushing 1650fps and about 700FPE – sending JHPs through body armor too ! Picking up an extra 40% muzzle energy is definitely neat, and I’m sure it cuts down on the significant flash of the round too.
OTOH, if I was going to grab an AR, it would take me a while to dig down to one that had a barrel longer than 16″. But I have a couple set up for home defense, shorter is much more convenient. Actually, my #1 go-to is a 14.5″ barrel with a can bringing it to about 20.5″. I think if you shorten a rifle a bit, or lengthen a pistol a bit, the results are negliglble. I took an AR from 16 to 14.5 once with about a 50fps drop in muzzle velocity (~2% loss,negligible). A really short rifle (7-10″) is essentially a flashbang. A long pistol caliber gun, with a suitable cartridge, can become darned impressive.
NFA was never supposed to make sense, it was intended to prohibit most people from being able to afford arms. Even ten dollar transfer taxes were a lot of money in 1934, but they weren’t any money at all to Pinkerton et al who were working as strike breakers. Interesting NFA fact, one, it’s partially screwed up because it was originally intended to also regulate pistols and when they re-wrote the pistol part out of it they ended up with a lot of screwed up stuff. Two, the reason their are exemptions for corporations and trusts on “sign-offs” is because they were afraid that some LEOs and such might side with mine workers and strikers rather than the people that were making people live and die by the whims of “the company store”. So the NFA really was an extremely fascist piece of legislation. Much more so in origins than most people realize. It very much was intended to make Law Enforcement and Corporations “Only Ones”.
As far as usefulness, The 16 and 18″ barrel 5.56 and .223AckImp see more use as shorty barrels waste a LOT of powder.
I’ve even got a 10″ 5.56 built AS A PISTOL with a brake on it.
THAT IS “OUCH” but it could handily set any enemy on fire within about 3 yards…
Bullpups are interesting, I have a few of them, but the armpit mag changes are less than ideal, it’s hard to get a decent trigger pull just because of the distances involved. And, as a friend of mine that’s ex-Royal Army pointed out once: “Yes you can put a bayonet on a SA-80/L-85 BUT you can also put one on a -14, -16, AK, etc…Guess who’s bayonet will probably strike home first…”
FWIW, the FAMAS is probably the best all around bullpup because it’s integrally ambidextrous. Pretty much all other bull-pups put you in a pretty sad spot if you have to shoot around to the left of cover or for some reason have to shoot left handed. AUGs and STGs require a left handed bolt, SA-80s don’t even bother thinking about it, FAMAS lets you pop the bolt out and switch the extractor and dummy plug over with no left hand parts needed in quite short order.
I’d rather peek out a little bit with an ambidextrous rifle, shooting weak side, than have to dive out from cover to use my rifle.
They may look goofy but they have good ergos and St. Etienne did their homework on them. If they were going to build a bullpup, they were going to build a useful one. This post brought to you by a collector of rifles of the nation that was the first to introduce self-loading rifles in large numbers in it’s armed forces and dealt with problematic North Africans by using their nation for their nuclear test site 🙂
The transfer tax for NFA guns was always $200 (around $2,800 in today’s dollars). The idea was that it was so prohibitively expensive that very few people would bother. They were mostly right, until inflation has made $200 a smaller and smaller portion of the purchase of the item (especially so for fully transferable MG’s) it’s the 1934 equivalent of them spending $14.20.
Even for my 11.5″ AR-15 SBR the $200 was not the majority of the cost.
The FAMAS is “readily converted” to fire with the wrong hand. It requires field stripping and reassembling the parts to eject the opposite way. I don’t think of that as integrally ambi. The FN 2000 or Kel Tec RFB are showing the way to an ambi bullpup; not that I am a huge fan or advocate of either design as produced.
It’s closer than any of the other bullpups. And I own a number of them. Field stripping a FAMAS is about as hard as field stripping a -16, i.e. not at all hard. If I was behind a wall and wanted to be able to shoot around to the left of it, I’d be a lot happier with a FAMAS and quickly swapping parts around than holding my AUG and wishing I had a left hand bolt in my kit…
FWIW, it’s 5 dollars for AOW, you’ll spend 10-15 bucks getting your fingerprint cards and photos, and 200 otherwise, plus photos and fingerprinting, etc, and mail. Not all NFA guns are taxed the same way. You can look it up in the CFRs. Certified return receipt is sorta important with the people in charge because otherwise they “lose” shit all the time because “it got lost on somebody’s desk”.
No need for CLEO signature or fingerprints if you are buying it as a corporation/trust/LLC. This is because the Pinkerton boys, et al SCREAMED when they were going to have to worry about that too, as they could afford the tax.
TRUE STORIES OF NFA.
FWIW, my grandfather bought a nice 2 story house with carriage house on an acre in a nice town in 1934 for 400 dollars, about 2,500 square feet.