Carcano Modello 91

About the Carcano Modello 91

The Carcano Modello 91 (Fucile Modello 1891) was the standard service rifle of the Kingdom of Italy from 1892 until 1945. Designed at the Turin Army Arsenal under chief technician Salvatore Carcano, it was the world's first military service rifle adopted in a small-bore (6.5mm) smokeless cartridge. The action uses a Mauser-style rotating bolt with two front locking lugs combined with a Mannlicher-pattern en-bloc clip feeding a 6-round integral magazine. Numerous shortened carbine and rifle variants were produced over its 53-year service life.

When Carcanos captured by Austria-Hungary during WWI were tested against contemporary rifles, Habsburg ordnance officers were reportedly unimpressed by build quality but startled by accuracy - Italian gunmakers had quietly produced one of the flatter-shooting service rifles of the era, a fact eclipsed in popular memory by the rifle's later association with the Kennedy assassination.

Carcano Modello 91 specifications

Famously the rifle (a 1940-dated M91/38 short rifle, serial C2766) used by Lee Harvey Oswald in the November 22, 1963 assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. The Carcano family retained its reputation in some quarters as outdated, but the underlying action design was sound and conversions in Mosin-Nagant 7.62x54R and other calibers were attempted into the late 20th century.