Is your Sturmgewehr a "battle rifle" or what?
This is a short post intended to illustrate that terms such as “assault rifle” or especially “battle rifle” are more or less meaningless for classification, unless used in historical context and in conjunction with a particular rifle that was named as such by someone who lacked a better idea…
Usually most people agree that an “assault rifle” is a select-fire rifle firing intermediate ammunition, right?
You sure?
Let’s look at some original assault rifles which were officially designated as such:
- Sturmgewehr 57. Swiss select-fire rifle also known as SIG SG-510, firing rather powerful 7.5×55 GP11 ammunition.
- Sturmgewehr 58. A license-built version of the 7.62x51mm select-fire FN FAL light automatic rifle, adopted by Austrian military.
- Fusil de Asalto CETME Modelo C, Spanish select-fire rifle firing the same 7.62×51 ammunition, and a direct ascendant to German HK G3 rifle.
So, are those “assault” rifles “battle” rifles as well? And, considering that both Swiss and Austrian militaries are of purely defensive nature (due to political neutrality of respective countries), how they can have anything but “defensive” rifles at all?
Max Popenker is a long-time firearms enthusiast and semi-amateur firearms historian from Russia. His primary interest is in automatic firearms, their evolution and use. He wrote a number of books on the subject and maintains a Modern Firearms website at http://world.guns.ru
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Doesn't it mean 'Storm Rifle'? So wouldn't they be refering to to the 'Storm' tactics they used in WWI? If so, then I think it's any rifle made for 'Storm/Shock/Assault Troopers.'
I will claim here, that in fact maybe that horrid 'Gun Safety' video of what Assault Rifles are is more than possibly correct in that it was an idea for WWI that only extended into WWII and even present day; that troops would get into the trenches and cut down as many of the enemy as they could.
The same tactic that lead to waves of grenadiers and burp gunners by Chinese forces in Korea.
I don't speak German, but I could confidently say I own many semi-auto 'Storm Rifles'.
Given that the 7.62x51mm in use around NATO countries is a slightly shortened .30-06 developed by the US armed forces, couldn't we consider long guns in that caliber (and similar ones, like the 7.62x54mmR used by the Russians) to be "battle rifles," while rifles using much smaller cartridges to be "assault rifles"?
I was under the impression that "assault rifles" with their "intermediate cartridges" were intended to provide more controllable bursts than was possible with the older, larger cartridges. A G3KA4 rifle and an HK33KA3 rifle use very similar mechanisms and are part of the same rifle family (the G3 series), but I'm sure that without compensators/suppressors they'd handle very differently, especially in bursts.