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The SBR: Why?

8K views 53 replies 17 participants last post by  458ready 
#1 ·
I'm a new guy here, and new guys can be suspect.

So let me frame it like this:

I believe that a citizen should own whatever he or she wants. If you are a citizen and not a felon and wish to own a full auto AK with a 2 inch barrel and an infinite ammo drum, good on you. I support that.

My question is from a technical standpoint.

I'll assume an SBR carries a tax stamp because it might be concealed. Never mind that an AR pistol is concealed a little more easily, and can be done so legally, without a tax stamp.

I'm making an educated guess that an SBR AR sacrifices a degree of power. It certainly has to sacrifice some range.

From a Joe Citizen standpoint, I see it as less than optimal for home defense. A shotgun is probably better, certainly cheaper.

For me, the SBR has limited practical applications. I've asked around, nobody can offer anything beyond "It looks cool", "This is what SEALs use", or "Because Liberals don't want you to have it".

All I can come up with is brush gun, and I think there are better choices for that.

So why the SBR?
 
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#38 ·
The regular ammo, in almost all rifle loads, gains velocity all the way out to 28" of barrel. You can, to a certain extent, tailor the type of powder used in your handloads, to achieve higher velocity in a short barrel than you'd get with the same bullet and factory ammo. It's feasible to get a 60 gr Nosler Partition softpoint to 2600 fps in an 11.5" 223 AR, for 900 ft lbs. It's a max load and has to be worked up to carefully, and not all barrels of that length can safely achieve it. But they can all get 2500 fps easily enough.

I was taught, 40 years ago, to just look over the rear sight, see the front sight in a certain way, and it's adequate for chest hits to 10 yds, or heads (bobbing around cover) to 5 yds. I don't see any point in spending time teaching myself a method with the rifle that only works at "indoor distances" , especially when the hold is so different from the normal stock/shoulder type. Also the stock above your shoulder hold (or sideways hold) depend upon a battery dependent, fragile optical sight, etc. It's rather silly, actually. If somebody could show me that they were say, 30% faster at getting the hits than I am, (doing it my way) I'd look into it, but that's not gonna happen.
 
#39 · (Edited by Moderator)
other than for shtf, I see no reason to bother with longarms at all. The longarm is far less likely to be there when you need it (in your home, even) than the likelihood of the pocket pistol not being "enough". For shtf, the pistol will be a joke, and the unsuppressed longarm won't be much better.

The $200 tax stamp is nothing much of a deterrent to ownership, but, the $1000 additional cost of the "can" often "puts-off" buyers! :) FORUM VIOLATION

btw, I notched the top of the luminous "normal range" wing of my peep sight, and built up "ears" atop it, so that it looks like a regular open sight. With this mod, my AR is fast hnadling enough to toss up a couple of soda cans and hit both in midair. This was completely impossible for me with the standard peep sight. In fact, I had trouble with reliably hitting just one tossed up soda can.

Maybe some can do that with point-firing techniques, but I have always needed to acquire a sight picture to get anything like reliable hits on such marks. You've got less than 1.5 seconds to shoulder the weapon and get those hits, when you toss up the cans yourself. I do this with the finger out of the guard, safety engaged, and the rifle held by the pistol grip, wih the buttplate on my hip. I've never been able to get any sort of reliable hit when the angle of the gun to the deck was less than 45 degrees, and 60 degrees is more like it. Hitting the 2.5" (tumbling) mark of the soda can at 10 ft, is harder than hitting the 6" head at 20 ft, geometry proves that. So this is useful way of testing your ability to swiftly hit a small, moving target.
 
#42 ·
Oh, ima get my popcorn for this........
 
#46 ·
For me the why is simple. I can register my TC G2 frame and attach a stock and pistol barrel. I can use shorter barrels and attach a suppressor on my SBR AR-15's. While I can do nearly the same using a barrrel shroud, the SBR weighs less and there is no shroud to get in the way.
 
#50 ·
At any rate,the shorter a barrel is ,the more velocity you lose from a high velocity round.A rifle caliber SBR looks "tacticool" but at the distance it will be used, a pistol caliber is a better choice-my wishlist is a MP5/10 SD but 15k is out of the picture.The new Sig "arm braces" work very well with no paperwork.
 
#53 ·
The 300 blackout performs well in a barrel that is 12" or 18". With a subsonic load the barrel length doesn't matter, not energy lost when the cartridge is loaded to 1000 fps. While it has a rainbow trajectory, it performs well at known distances out to 500 yards without much noise when suppressed. Others like the JDJ cartridges and the TCU's are well suited to SBR's.
 
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