You didn’t look at any of the links, did you? Carbine classes aren’t about “sports shooting.” They are about learning to use your carbine efficiently and effectively for shooting other people. Sports shooters, no doubt, attend them. What you see lots of, though, are cops, military, private security, and self-defense oriented private citizens. In a typical class, you’ll go through a thousand rounds and you’ll shoot under stress, from awkward positions, from your weak side, and with a screaming hot carbine. And while you are doing all this, you’ll constantly have to made shoot/don’t shoot decisions.
Semi automatic or fully automatic? Why limit semi auto? What country? 
It’s cheaper. The AK-47 is more popular for much the same reason McDonald’s sells more Big Macs than Morton’s sells steaks. Or to be more topical, what’s the most widely manufactured supersonic jet fighter of all time? The MiG-21. Was it the best? No… indeed, so far as I am aware there was never a moment in its existence when the MiG-21 was the world’s best jet. * It sure was cheap, though.*
That the same forces can afford rocket grenades and such strikes me as being… well, a strange objection. My house is much more expensive than my car, but I was still very price sensitive when I bought my car. My car’s much more expensive than my cell phone but I’m still unwilling to spend $80 a month on a cell plan if I can get one for $60. The AK-47 was easy to get, and cheap. It’s cheap per unit, cheap to maintain, cheap to train in, cheap to load.
You don’t necessarily want the very best. You want the best value for your own budget.
A carbine course would train a participant in how to be more effective in combat and more competitive in “practical” sport shooting. For example, a carbine course doesn’t aim to teach one how to charge his weapon with a fresh mag, it aims to develop in one the muscle memory to do so instinctively.
Both (civilians cannot own functioning full-auto weapons full stop), because some nutter used one to shoot up a tourist attraction and kill a lot of people over a decade ago, and Australia.
I had a look at a couple of the links and was trying to work out who would attend such classes, given that your earlier posts seemed to indicate they were a firearms handling course much like the sort required here to obtain a gun licence or maybe for serious, international competition shooters to hone their skills. They didn’t strike me as something the average shooter would (or should) be going to for the sheer hell of it, basically.
Of course, around here, the police and military run all their training stuff “in-house” for the most part, so even appropriately licensed shooters can’t go and get “Practical” (read: “Combat”) training from somewhere like a local equivalent of Gunsite (if such existed, which it doesn’t to the best of my knowledge), and even if they could, a lot of questions would be asked. Firearms training here is solely based around safe handling, target shooting (including things like IPSC and Western Action with handguns), and hunting. Cultural differences and all that, basically.
Well there is the fact that Moscow would give AKs to any swinging dick that wanted to start a revolution.
Ignoring that a 300% difference in cost is huge. That is the difference between 3 out of every ten of your soldiers having a weapon and every single one of them being armed.
(insert bang-de-bang-bang joke here)
Supposedly they plan on deploying it in 2011. But at $25000 per weapon and ammo costing $25 a pop, you better want to kill someone really freakin bad!
The M16 and AK series of weapons are sort of the Coke and Pepsi of assault rifles. The AK is popular because it is cheap and very rugged.
Scumpup and Martini Enfield, I am glad to see that you two appear to have decided to let your bickering taper off.
DO NOT resume it.
[ /Moderating ]
I’m sorry, what? I honestly don’t see any of the “Bickering”, at least on my part. 
The pimp hand came out on us because you called me a dick and I said about you walking bow legged. Whether we think we were bickering doesn’t matter. Now we’d best smile and act thankful before the pimp hand is brought down on our impertinent selves.
You bitches be trippin’.
Word.
Indeed. Oh, wait- adjusts hat to silly angle
Fo’Shizzle. 
The very first issue of Army Times that I bought as a new soldier back in 1989 had a big article about the testing of the new army rifle. Fast forward to 2011 and we are still using a M16 variant.
From experience I can easily hit targets at 300 meters with a M4. The jamming problems went away with the original M16. The current version is very reliable as long as it is maintained the way any soldier should.
The M4 has replaced the M16 because it is easier to get in and out of vehicles with and to do things like clear buildings with its smaller size. When I saw some people still carrying the M16 when I was in Iraq it looked freakishly long despite the fact that I carried one for a couple decades. With the rail system it is also very versatile.
There is no need to go back to a long heavy rifle.
Thanks, Loach! Always good to hear the voice of experience.
My understanding is that the assault rifle (Sturmgewehr, M-16, Kalashnikov AK-47, etc.) trades long range accuracy like a Garand provides in favor of compactness and rapid fire. The engagements that were typically observed weren’t ones in which long range accuracy was particularly helpful, but where soldiers needed to get the lead out FAST.
In fact, the Soviet Army switched to the AK-74 in the mid-'Seventies, which firing the 5.45x39mm round (ballistically similar to the 5.56x45mm NATO round). The AK-47 type rifle (actually mostly the AKM, an improved version) was heavily exported by the Soviet Union because it was cheap to manufacture and because they literally had decades-worth of surplus ammunition to offload to every supposed Marxist revolutionary regime in Africa and Latin America.
Curiously, no one has mentioned the adoption of the 6.8mm Remington SPC round by many SOCOM units and increasingly by law enforcement special tactics. This is an intermediate round (falling ballistically between the 5.56x45mm and the 7.62x51mm) that has a flatter trajectory than the latter and more impulse transfer and penetration than the former, while still being suitable for the AR-15 platform weapons (and in fact many manufacturers are offering AR-15 compatible upper receivers that fire the 6.8 SPC).
The Garand is a large, heavy, awkward rifle that is maintenance-intensive, offers a slow rate of fire, a limited magazine capacity, and worst of all, tends to slam the bolt down on your thumb as you are loading from stripper clips. It was so impractical that the Army developed a .45 ACP submachine gun to complement it for close range work, despite the limited range of that round. The M14 is an improved version, but honestly, I’d take a SIG 510-4 or H&K G3 any day, these being pretty much the epitome of the full caliber battle rifle. As a light caliber assault rifle, I think the Steyr AUG is probably the best design ever built.
Stranger
From what I’ve read, 6.8mm SPC seems to share a lot of similarities to 6.5x5mm Swedish, which is an outstanding and extremely versatile round. I’m not surprised some of the SpecOps guys are interested in it, basically.
Also similar to the .280 British or the .276 Pedersen, which were arguably ahead of their time.
Stranger