At the SHOT Show last weekend, we has the opportunity to interview Charles St. George, designer of the Leader T2 rifle we have previously discussed. We ended up having to run this interview twice, as background noise made the first take unfortunately inaudible - but our second take came out quite...

Today we're looking at three different books on the 1903 Springfield rifle. Which one is best for you? That depends on what you're looking for...

Swiss rifles offer a great place for a new collector to put together a set of rifles with mechanical and historical interest, that are in great condition and still available for reasonable prices. The Swiss used three main variations of the Schmidt-Rubin type rifle, and all can still be found tod...

By request, today we're going to look at one of the less common locking systems used in firearms design: flapper locking. The idea was first patented by a Swede named Friberg in 1870, but a practical gun was not built on the design until the 1907 Kjellman. The most extensive use of the system was...

The 1862 Police Pocket was the last of Colt's percussion revolvers. It was a combination of the small 1849 model frame (intended for .31 caliber) and a 5-shot .36 caliber cylinder. The frame was stepped to allow the larger cylinder to fit without require any changes to the lockwork, and the resul...

The Jatimatic was a Finnish submachine gun intended for bodyguards and private security forces. It was designed in the 1980s, and never achieved much success despite having some interesting and clever features. The bolt is designed like and Uzi or CZ-23/24 bolt, wrapping around the barrel to allo...

The 1905 Steyr-Mannlicher was developed by Ferdinand Mannlicher, one of Europe's most prolific gun designers. It uses the 7.65mm Mannlicher cartridge, which is roughly equivalent to .32 ACP, with a 10-round fixed internal magazine. The 1905 is, in my opinion, a fantastically elegant pistol, handl...

After World War II, Egypt experimented with several types of new rifle as a series of leaders bought arms from both Western and Communist nations. They included FN49 rifles from Belgium and vz52 and vz52/57 rifles from Czechoslovakia before a deal was made to license production of a copy of the S...

Dolf Goldsmith is one of the coolest old-timer gun folks we've ever had the pleasure of meeting. Not only is he a bona fide expert on a wide range of firearms and a prolific author (having written the definitive books on the Maxim and Vickers guns and now five volumes on the Browning machine gun)...

We have another piece of our chat with Dolf for you today, on what brought Destructive Devices to the attention of the general American public - and why the New York police came looking for his Lahti...

For more details on the bazooka incident, you can read a copy of the front-page New York Ti...

Our friend Joe had the opportunity not too long ago to take out a French Mle 1924/29 Chatellerault light machine gun for test firing. The 24/29 is a quite nice LMG that is definitely under-appreciated. As with several other very good guns, it gets an automatic poor reputation simply for being Fre...

Despite numerous experiments, most notably the Heckler & Koch G11, the advantages of caseless ammunition have never been able to outweigh the disadvantages. But that doesn't stop the idea from being pretty intriguing. We had the opportunity to take a look at a demonstration mockup of a caseless a...

Unfortunately, when we visit great gun collections there is never enough time to do everything we would like to. We always have to leave great stuff undone, as much as we don't like to. Well, we got to visit one particular collection with a bunch of great stuff, and amongst the other items found ...

I offer our Facebook fans the choice of which video they would like to see today, and the result was overwhelmingly the British EM2 rifle. These were made in both .280/30 and 7.62 NATO calibers, and the one we had the chance to play with was in 7.62. I apologize in advance for the brief amount o...

The Volcanic repeating pistol was the first direct step along the development path of the lever-action rifle that became an icon of the American West. Introduced before the advent of modern brass-cased cartridges, the Volcanic was notable for both its repeating action and the self-contained ammun...

The book (pair of books, actually) we're looking at today is a bit less rigorous than our usual material, and more humanistic. It's a pair of books entitled Veteran Bring Backs and Veteran Bring Backs Volume II, by Edward Tinker. Both volumes are compilations of firearms (and a few other related ...

Gary Paul Johnston and Thomas Nelson's The World's Assault Rifles is always one of the first books we turn to for information on automatic rifles. At 1200+ pages, it's a huge tome and a massive amount of research went into it. Mr Nelson previously published two volumes on submachine guns and a bo...

James Paris Lee began designing and patenting firearms in 1862, but it was not until 1875 that any of his designs were put into limited manufacture. He would ultimately see four of his rifles adopted by the US military (M1879, M1883, M1885, M1895), plus a large royalty from the British government...

The Whitney Wolverine (aka Whitney, Lightning, or Hillson Imperial) was a very space-age looking .22 automatic pistol designed by Robert Hillberg in the 1950s. It made novel use of materials (aluminum castings) and many clever design subtleties, and was a remarkably good pistol. However, the comp...

The Sterling submachine gun is one of the better submachine guns ever built - a lot of throught and engineering work went into its design. It is light, compact, ergonomic, very durable and reliable, and uses one of the best magazines ever made for submachine guns. It may be a gun overlooked by a ...

The final chapter in our continuing Luger series is today's book, The Parabellum is Back! While Sturgess' three-volume encyclopedia covers the pistol through 1918 and Simson Lugers takes us through Weimar, that leaves a lot still to learn. Luger production continued in World War II, and afterward...

Today we have a book with a wider appeal than most, as it covers a broad range of different gun designs and has lots of good information for both the very technical collector and the casual pistol enthusiast. It's Gordon Bruce's new book, The Evolution of Military Automatic Pistols: Self-loading ...

In the 1880s, the Dutch decided that their single-shot Beaumont rifles were obsolete and needed replacement. They started a program to modify them with 4-round magazines, and simultaneously set about finding a more modern rifle to adopt. After trying with some difficulty to test out new designs (...

Today we're looking at John Potocki's excellent reference work, The Colt 1905 Automatic Pistol. Not much doubt what the subject is, right? The development of John Browning's iconic 1911 pistol is generally not much discussed, and Potocki's book is a good way to learn all the ins and outs of the p...