Wanted: M1 Carbines For Sale

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Long before the AR15 became America’s rifle, the country’s real ballistic sweetheart was the adorable WW2-vintage M1 carbine. Millions of GIs met these lithe little guns while in uniform. Countless thousands were subsequently smuggled home from the war back before Uncle Sam got quite so nuts about stuff like that.

The government sold surplus carbines by the truckloads to civilians through the Civilian Marksmanship Program. Scads of these old guns have been imported in recent decades as well. Auto-Ordnance and Inland Manufacturing still make them from scratch today. The end result is a robust market in collectible carbines that can seem overwhelming at first brush. As with most things, the devil is in the details.

Origin Story

Designed during the early dark days of World War 2, the Winchester engineers who built this thing bodged together that first prototype in thirteen days. David “Carbine” Williams actually contrived the basic action while incarcerated for the murder of a Law Enforcement officer. Upon his release, Williams was hired to complete a full-power .30-06 infantry rifle called the G30 first begun by Jonathan “Ed” Browning, half-brother of the luminary gun designer John Moses Browning. The resulting hybrid weapon was eventually scaled down to accept the straight-walled .30 carbine cartridge, and history was made.

American industry produced some 6.1 million carbines between 1942 and 1945. At the apogee of production, we were churning out 65,000 of these tidy rifles every day. Unit cost during World War 2 was around $45. That would be closer to $830 today. Nowadays, the carbine is one of the most collectible weapons in America.

The Lay of the Land

There is an Internet-based cult that orbits around carbine collecting. I’m not a member of that particular church myself, but I am a regular visitor to that hallowed sanctuary. The nitnoid details of markings, condition, and originality form the space where dreams either thrive or die. It behooves the neophyte just dipping his or her toes into this weird little world to do some homework. There’s money to be made here, so unscrupulous folks will fake most anything. I had to learn that myself the hard way. 

The earliest carbines sported a simple L-shaped flip rear sight and lacked bayonet lugs. At some point, most wartime carbines were run through a refurbishment program wherein they were fitted with an improved adjustable rear sight and a bayonet lug as well as an upgraded magazine catch and a few other lesser incidentals. The details of these components have been exhaustively explored online.

Eleven different contractors made these guns. During the rebuild process, the sundry parts got mixed and matched, subsequently becoming hopelessly muddled. The good folks who were doing this were just trying to arm our troops serving downrange. They didn’t care at all about keeping things original. As a result, virgin early war guns command a premium.

Details

In general, the early rare stuff is way more expensive than late common examples. Early stocks for both regular carbines as well as the M1A1 paratrooper sort sported what is called high wood. This term describes an elevated strip of walnut within the operating slide raceway. These stocks were found to be a bit fragile under hard use, so this space was left wider on later examples. Original high wood stocks are both expensive and hard to find today.

Early carbines featured a pushbutton magazine release just ahead of the pushbutton safety. However, particularly when stressed, it was easy to inadvertently hit the wrong switch and drop the magazine when you were actually trying to shoot something. Later safeties were upgraded to a rotating lever design that was much more intuitive.

Early bolts were flat, while late bolts were round. I have no idea why. Late-war rear sights could be machined or stamped. Most parts big enough to accept them were marked with manufacturer’s codes. The meaning of these codes is easy to ascertain online. Modern imports are marked with some ancillary information on the barrels to differentiate them from unmolested originals. This also helps retain the value of those unspoiled guns.

Taking the Plunge

I accumulated my carbines via horse trading at gun shows and by meticulously stalking my prey on GunBroker.com. I made a few mistakes along the way. Hopefully you will do a better job than did I. One of the most desirable carbine manufacturers was the Rock-Ola jukebox company. They were the second-smallest producer of carbines, so they are rare today. However, it is undeniably cool having a combat rifle made by a jukebox company. Acquiring a vintage Rock-Ola carbine was a bit if bucket list thing for me.

The original manufacturer of the rifle stamped their identifying information along with a serial number on the back of the receiver. This is obvious with the old-style flip rear sights. The later adjustable sort, however, quite effectively occludes this information. When I was just getting into this, I found a decent carbine at a decent price at a gun show with the basic late features indicating that it had been through the rebuild process. I was thrilled to see “Rock-Ola” stamped onto the barrel alongside the date of manufacture. As these were the days before the Internet, I naturally assumed this meant that Rock-Ola made the gun. 

Once I got the rifle home and started poking around I discovered that the receiver was actually marked “Inland Div.” Inland was the subsidiary of General Motors that was the largest producer of carbines. It was simply that parts from all the various manufacturers, to include barrels, were liberally swapped about during the rebuild process. It was a rookie mistake, but I was a rookie.

It’s much easier to make informed buying decisions nowadays with so many good resources available online. Do a few screenshots on your phone, and you can identify the origins of sundry parts even when the cell service is sketchy. Bring a penlight and maybe even a magnifying glass if you plan on hunting at a gun show. If you are looking at a specific gun online and they don’t show the details you are looking for just ask for a specific shot. Most sellers are happy to oblige.

Expect to pay about a grand for a base model mismatched gun. Pristine versions with the right pedigree can run many times that. Once you get into the really good stuff, the price is whatever the market will bear.

The Really Good Stuff

Wartime M1A1 paratrooper carbines were produced in two major lots. Inland built them all, and they can be found both with and without the late-war upgrades. Paratrooper carbines are notorious for being faked. An aftermarket imported replica M1A1 stock will set you back $175 from Sarco. It takes literally no talent to strip out your conventional action and drop it in place. 

Teasing out an original from a nicely-weathered fake demands a knowledge of the casting markings on the buttplate, the details of the leather cheek piece, and the particulars of the wooden bits. Be forewarned, some of the fakers are crazy good at replicating these things. They only made around 150,000 factory originals.

In mid-1944, we began fielding an upgraded selective fire version of the carbine called the M2. The original specs for the carbine called for full auto operation, but that requirement was dropped in the rush to get the weapons into service. These selective fire rifles could be had as either factory guns or they could be converted at the unit level via GI-issue conversion kits. 

Curiously, the M1 carbine is one of the few readily-available rifles in the US market that can be converted to full auto simply by swapping out parts. There are seven critical components, all of which are currently available from various sources online. However, possession of all seven, even in the absence of a host rifle, is considered constructive possession of a machinegun by the BATF. The way to differentiate the M1 from the M2 at a glance is the presence of the exposed selector lever on the left side of the action. It’s obvious when you know what to look for. 

Some factory selective fire rifles were marked “M2” on their receivers. These receivers are otherwise indistinguishable from their semiauto M1 counterparts and can be encountered on rare occasion on the surplus market. However, in keeping with their “once a machinegun, always a machinegun” mantra, the BATF has declared these M2-marked receivers to be automatically illegal unless they were registered prior to 1986. The government made around 600,000 M2 carbines. 

On the civilian machinegun market, these weapons can be sold as complete guns or as registered conversion parts. I have seen registered receivers, trigger housings, and trip levers. In this case, a registered trip lever or trigger housing is technically a bit more desirable, at least for a shooter, as they can be moved from host to host without much fuss. Expect to give around $16k for a registered parts gun. An original factory version is a couple grand more than that.

The Army fielded the infrared “Snooper Scope” on an M2 carbine, designated it the M3, and got a handful into combat in the latter months of the war in the Pacific. These rudimentary night sights only had about a 75-yard range, but they were used to good effect against night infiltration raids by the Japanese in Okinawa. The sights are both massive and heavy, but they can still be found on the collector’s market. However, as the original host rifles were almost all selective fire M2’s, these rigs are invariably mounted on vintage semiauto hosts today. About 3,000 originals were produced.

Practical Tactical

Everybody who is serious about military gun collecting needs a beater M1 carbine. These compact rifles are fun to shoot, and they would render fine service as a home defense arm even today. Additionally, accessories are plentiful at reasonable cost. Recoil is trivial, and the little gun will reach out as far as I am comfortable shooting with iron sights. When I was a kid growing up in the Deep South, the carbine was a popular deer rifle for young hunters.

With that as a foundation, it is easy to get carried away. I have known folks who invested their lives accumulating carbines from all major manufacturers with just the right features. If you feel led down that path, expect that to set you back some proper coin, particularly if you fold the full auto M2 into the mix.

The golden ring is an early model M1A1 paratrooper with all the right particulars and some reliable combat provenance. I have a friend who had a local widow gift him a vintage paratrooper carbine her husband carried when he jumped into Normandy on 6 June 1944. It is literally impossible to establish a price for a gun like that. That verifiable story makes it unique.

Ruminations

I have accumulated a modest collection of carbines myself. After that first false start, I have been much more discriminating. The collector’s landscape is a minefield, but victory comes to the patient. I stalked GunBroker for months to bag a couple of the classics. They’re out there. However, this deep in the Information Age don’t expect to find many bargains. It is too easy to identify something awesome online. The days of tripping over some hidden barn find at the local pawn shop are all but over. Carbine collecting is definitely a niche unto itself. Finding just the right example can be a rewarding challenge. Good luck and good hunting.

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