Savvy Sniper

Inland’s T30: the Accuracy of a Scoped Rifle in a Handy Carbine

- Mike Searson

Sometimes it’s better to own a quality replica that you can shoot to your heart’s content than a mint original that gathers dust as a collector piece in your safe.

Inland Manufacturing offers a variety of newly made M1 carbines as rugged and reliable as the original military versions. I recently had a chance to go hands-on with the company’s latest variant, the T30 sniper carbine—as unlikely as this configuration may seem.

COSTLY ORIGINALS

First, I have a confession to make. I used to hate the M1 carbine. They felt cheap, the caliber seemed anemic and I used to walk past barrels of them in the gun shops of yesteryear when they were sold as cheap as $50 each.

That started to change after some training classes with Jim Cirillo in the ‘90s when he told me that every one-shot stop he ever witnessed as part of the old NYPD Stakeout Unit was performed with an M1 carbine.

Of course by that time, the prices had increased significantly and something in the back of my mind could not get past paying several times what I saw those GI-issued rifles selling for just a few years earlier. Decades later, the price has gone completely out of control, unless you want a spurious “mix master” or commercial version. As an example, an original Inland M1 carbine from World War II sold through the Rock Island Auction recently for $8625.

That brings out a sobering truth: No matter how tired you may get of seeing racks of old military surplus rifles, they are a finite resource, a dying breed. Sooner or later the supply will come to an end. If you are lucky, that old design may come back as a replica, like it did in the case with the T30.

THE REPLICA