Recently, my buddy Liem asked me if I would like to shoot a couple of his rifles. They are Ruger PC9 and PC4 Carbines. Of course, I said, "Sure!"

These carbines were designed by Ruger in 1996 and were discontinued in 2006. But they are still available for sell and can be obtained fairly easily.

The "PC" in the name stands for Police Carbine, and the carbine was developed for use by police officers so that they could have a carbine in a pistol caliber that matched their handgun. It had some commercial success, but sales did not meet expectations and they were discontinued.

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Here's the PC4 in .40 S&W caliber.

The stock is hollow, and this allows the carbine to be very light weight, about 7 pounds.

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Liem has installed a Bushnell Red Dot scope on the .40 S&W model with an after-market base.

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It takes the standard magazine that fits the Ruger P Series pistols, allowing interchangeability of the magazines in both systems. The .40 magazine holds 11 rounds.

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The carbines have a good rear sight with simple adjustments and a post front sight with protective ears, much like a military rifle sight on the M-1 carbine. Some models have a peep rear sight.

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The magazine release is located just forward of the trigger and is easy to access and manipulate.

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Liem had installed a Leupold 4X scope on the 9mm model, but had not sighted it in yet.

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We tried to do that today, but the scope ran out of adjustment before it was zeroed correctly, so we removed it and shot the 9mm with iron sights.

As you can see the lay-out of the action on the carbine looks much like the Ruger 10-22 rimfire rifle.

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I shot the .40 caliber carbine and ran some of the Falcoat coated lead bullets that I had loaded a while ago.

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They ran fine through the rifle and I got this group at 50 yards with the red dot sight.

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Liem shot the 9mm from the bench to adjust the iron sights and they were right on the money.

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Of course, these rifles are not bench rest rifles, but instead are "room clearing" rifles, so we moved up and ran them standing up.

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We shot a series of double taps.

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Liem shot this nice group with some JHP ammo that we tried.

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I also shot some double taps.

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And here are 6 of my shots.

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The little rifles are light weight and handle well. They run just fine with any quality ammo. The .40 S&W had more recoil, not painful at all, but noticeably more than the 9mm.

Of course, the main advantage of a pistol caliber carbine is not a great deal of improvement in terminal ballistics, but instead the added accuracy possible with a shoulder-fired weapon system. Especially for new shooters, a shoulder-fired carbine is much easier to shoot well than a pistol.

They are not "sniper rifles" and were not designed for that role, but are simply a shoulder-fired pistol caliber carbine.

If you are interested in a pistol caliber carbine, either for fun plinking or for home defense, you might give these a look. They are nice little carbines.

And, it's fun to shoot stuff.