Battle Rifles

  Battle rifle is a post World War II term for military service rifles that are fed ammo through a detachable magazines and fire a full-powered rifle cartridge. The term "battle rifle" was created largely to better differentiate the intermediate power rifles like the StG-44, AK-47 and M16 from full powered rifles like the FN FAL, M14 and H&K G3 as both classes of firearms have a similar appearance and share many of the same features such as detachable magazines and pistol grips. Battle Rifle also describes older military full powered semi automatic rifles such as the M1 Garand, Gewehr 43, MAS-49, and the SVT-40. Before the 90's, the term was not well defined and was used as a general description for all types of military rifles.