Range Report: Ruger LC Carbine (.45 ACP)

I’ve kinda had the hots for this little gun since it first came on the market, so when I had a chance to exchange one of my “spare” guns for the LC a week ago, I jumped at it, and went to pop a few rounds off at the range yesterday, you know, just to make my acquaintance  I even bought a couple boxes of 230gr FMJ for the occasion, and two spare mags.

There are a lot of things to like about the LC:  the chambering (.45 ACP, ’nuff said), the compact size, the Glock 21 12-round* mags it uses, and of course the Ruger quality and reliability.  And yeah, it has all that.  I also found the trigger acceptable — about a 5-lb break but very crisp, and the gun was acceptably consistent in terms of grouping (given my shitty eyesight):  the bullets struck dead center off a sandbag at 25 yards.  (It also shot 4″ low out of the box, but with the front-sight adjustment tool I got that right.)

And it fed reliably — not a single jam or malfunction with either the FMJ or the various hollowpoint cartridges I tested it with.  Clockwork, brass ejected firmly etc. etc.

Mechanically, therefore, it was fine;  and on that basis I’d take it to war, so to speak, without a qualm.

But the “ergonomics” (as Mae calls the feel of a gun)?  Not so fine.

The recoil is excessive, even considering that it’s shooting the John Moses Browning .45 ACP cartridge and not a proper rifle cartridge.  That straight-though stock (more on that in a moment) slams the stock straight into the shoulder with considerable force.  Even when I popped an extra recoil pad on the butt, it wasn’t pleasant.

And here’s something I’ve noticed when shooting these kinds of guns (e.g. the AR-15 and others of the “chassis” gun type) while wearing hearing protection “lids”:  you can’t get a decent stock weld with your cheek to get the sights to fall naturally into your sight line.  That’s because unlike a regular rifle, there is no drop of the stock below the barrel line, so your ear protection (we used to call them “pots”) get in the way of your hold.

Now on my AR, you can see that my cheek does not need to come down onto the stock because I’m using a high-elevation red-dot sight.  But the low position of the pop-up iron sights on the LC makes life difficult, in that you have to re-position your head after every shot.

So basically, I’m going to have to put a high-rise red-dot sight on the LC, which I did not want to do because the aperture (Garand- or Marble type) is plenty accurate for me and to be frank, that’s one of the reasons for owning a short-range pistol-caliber carbine (PCC) in the first place.  Like a fork, you pick it up and it works.

I’m starting to regret selling my M1 Carbine, now.

Does this mean that the LC is going to be used only in the open air, when I don’t have to wear pots and just rely on earplugs — i.e. when I go over to TDSA twice a year?

Frankly, I’m disappointed because I was looking for a good answer to the question, “Do I really need an AR-15 ‘pistol’ for those social occasions?”

And the Ruger LC Carbine doesn’t seem to be it.  In my hands, it’s about a 50% solution, and I don’t like those.

Right now, of the two carbines I prefer to shoot the AR — and I don’t especially like shooting the AR.

Also, that “flared mag well” caused me to pop a blood blister on the heel of my right hand (for the first time in about forty-odd years) when I slammed a mag home.  Ouch.

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*Glock calls them 13-round mags;  I call them 12 because it’s impossible to load that 13th round without that loading tool thingy.