Launched in 2016, the Bren 2 was a significant upgrade program over the original Bren 805 rifle. In addition to being offered in both 5.56mm and 7.62x39mm with user-changeable barrels, the Bren 2 was both simpler and lighter than the 805. virtually every part of the rifle was improved, from remov...

Today's item is an example of the smallest centerfire pistol ever made - a 2.7mm Kolibri semiauto. About a thousand of these were made between 1910 and 1914, firing a 3-grain projectile at about 650 fps (for a total of 3 ftlb of muzzle energy). It may be insanely impractical, but it's a great pi...

The M1895 Lee Navy was a rifle well ahead of it's time - a smallbore (6mm) straight-pull bolt action adopted by the US Navy at the same time that the US Army was adopting the Krag-Jorgenson. The Lee Navy was designed by James Paris Lee (the same man who designed the Lee Enfield action), and was a...

Manufactured in Brooklyn from 1861 until 1863, Moore's revolver was a 7-shot single-action piece firing .32 rimfire cartridges. What makes it unique is its swing-out cylinder design - the first commercial revolver in the US to use this mechanism. A latch on the back of the frame released the enti...

The Khyber Pass is a well known center of arms production, with gunmaking there going back at least 100 years. The quality of craftsmanship varies greatly, from excellent and safe weapons to thoroughly unsafe guns made with little more than hand files and drills. In the last decade or so, much of...

The Type 97 was a copy of the Czech ZB-26 machine gun which was used in early Japanese tanks and tankettes. It is chambered for 8mm Mauser, and uses standard ZB-26 20-round magazines. This particular one is in the collection of the owner at Battlefield Vegas, a machine gun rental range in Las Veg...

The Fiala Model 1920 was a manually-operated repeating pistol in .22LR caliber that was marketed with the backing of famed polar explorer Anthony Fiala. The guns came as a set of one frame, three barrels (3", 7.5", and 20") and a removable shoulder stock. This allowed the owner to set the gun up ...

The Cobray Terminator is an unusual - and unusually impractical - single-shot 12 gauge shotgun. It uses a sort of open bolt system in which the barrel is under spring pressure, and slams backwards into a fixed firing pin when the trigger is pulled. Only about 1500 of these were made before they w...

The Ladies Home Companion was a pistol (technically) made by the Cobray company on the same frame as their 12ga "Street Sweeper" shotgun. It had no stock or front grip, and was chambered for the .45-70 rifle cartridge, carrying 12 rounds in its fixed drum magazine. It's kinda like watching a trai...

The Bullard company was one of the lesser-known firearm manufacturers during the late 1800s, producing both single-shot falling block and lever-action repeating rifles. This particular example is a .45 caliber large-frame sporter. It was originally a very fancy, high end version of the gun, and s...

The "Apache" was a combination knife, brass knuckle, and revolver made by several companies in Belgium and France, which became associated with a group of street thugs in Paris around the turn of the century.

The T124E2 was the last US antitank gun, and was discontinued after only about 100 had been made - before it was put into service. It was a high velocity 76mm piece, and was replaced by the much smaller 75mm recoilless rifle.

The "Hermit Kingdom" of North Korea has a number of somewhat unusual military firearms that are not quite direct copies of anything else, but we very rarely get to see example of them up close. The Type 70 was intended for high-ranking officers, replacing the Type 64 (which was a copy of the Brow...

The Radium was the predecessor to the much more well-known (and more successful) Ruby pistol made by Gabilonda y Urresti, which was sold to the French Army by the hundreds of thousands during World War One. The Radium was very unusual in its magazine design, which featured a spring loaded sliding...

Most countries still had anti-tank rifles in their military inventory at the beginning of WWII - the Solothurn S18-100, the Lahti L39, the Boys AT Rifle, the PTRD and PTRS, and so on. For Germany, this role was fulfilled by the Panzerbüchse 39, a single-shot falling block rifle firing a high velo...

Two of the scarcest and least known of John Pedersen's designs are the Model GY and GX rifles, which are basically copies of the production model of the M1 Garand. After losing out in the Army rifle trials with his toggle-locked rifle design, Pedersen made one last attempt to garner a US military...

Most people who recognize the name Mondragon know it from Manuel Mondragon's model 1908 semiauto rifle, the first such rifle to be adopted on a large scale by a military (the Mexican Army, in this case). Well, Mondragon was designing arms for many years before that particular rifle. For example, ...

Like most countries, Germany had a standard-issue antitank rifle when World War II began - the Panzerbuchse 39. It fired an 8x94mm cartridge with a small very high velocity armor-piercing bullet. And like the other AT rifles from the 1930s, the PzB-39 became obsolete quickly as tank armor improv...

Today we have a video for you on a German "Jager" pistol, so named because it was made by the Jager company. Jager was a well-respected maker of high quality sporting arms, having been established in 1901 in Suhl, Germany. With the onset of World War One, Kaiser Wilhelm decreed that all arms manu...

While we were at SAR West this past weekend, we of course took some time to check in with Jeff from Apex Gun Parts. We've been buying goodies from Jeff long before we started up the blog, and his customer service is second to none.

The FS2000 is the semiauto civilian version of FN's F2000 bullpup rifle. It was designed for military use, but contracts have been well below FN's hopes - only Slovenia has decided to adopt it as a standard service weapon (several other nations have bought small quantities for specialized uses). ...

Today we're look at the two main French military centerfire revolvers - the model 1873 and model 1892. These both served for many decades with French troop around the world, and they're interesting designs.

How could a gun nerd like me possibly resist a chance to dig through a warehouse full of surplus? When Jeff at Apex Gun Parts offered us the chance to come visit his operation, we jumped at the chance (duh!). Jeff is a sponsor of the site here because we've been buying cool things from him for ye...

James Hughes' Mexican Military Arms is a pretty good book on a subject not often written about. It covers all the rifles used by the Mexican Army (both locally designed and purchased elsewhere) from the Spencer repeater up to the adoption of the M1 Garand. It is a bit limited in coverage, though,...