The miquelet lock is generally considered the first true, mature flintlock action in the progression of firearms technology. It combined the pan cover and frizzen (the plate against which the flint strikes) into a single multi-purpose part. This particular pistol is a good example of the characte...

The Smith & Wesson 1940 Light Rifle is one of the spectacular failures of arms design, on several levels. It was too expensive, too heavy, too fragile (ironically, given the weight), too difficult to manipulate, and just all-in-all bad. To put the bad-ness in perspective, the British cancelled th...

This particular rifle is a prototype of the reproduction VG1-5 (or more correctly called the Gustloff MP-507) rifles that will be available for sale soon from Chuck at GunLab.net. The VG1-5 was a gas-delayed blowback design that has been used in handguns, but not in any other rifle designs. For m...

The Type 94 Nambu is a much-maligned pistol used by the Japanese military from 1935-1945. It's actually a much better gun than people give it credit for, but we will address that in a later video. For now, enjoy some high-speed footage of it firing!

Slow motion footage of a Luger pistol firing - 500 fps and 2000 fps.

Today's high speed video analysis is the first Browning-style pistol that was at hand when I took out the camera: a Star Model B Super. Manufactured in Spain for many years, this basic pistol was made in both 9mm Luger and 9mm Largo variations as well as full-size and shortened varieties. This pa...

Today's slow motion subject is a Russian PKM general-purpose machine gun, often considered the best overall machine gun design in service today. These clips were filmed at 2000 frames/second.

Today we're looking at a luftgekühltes maschinengewehr 08/15 in slow motion - a lightened and air-cooled version of the Maxim used on German WWI aircraft. This particular example is set up as a Zeppelin gun, with a buttstock and pistol grip (guns mounted on fixed-wing aircraft had different fire-...

The MAS 49/56 was the final evolution of a French direct gas impingement rifle design that nearly entered mass production in 1940, but was interrupted by the German invasion. It uses a tilting bolt to lock (similar to the FAL) and a direct gas impingement system to operate (very similar to the AG...

This week's slow motion gun is the Frommer Stop, put into production in 1912. The Hungarian designer Rudolf Frommer was responsible for a series of long-recoil pistols, of which the Stop was the last and best. It is chambered for 7.65mm Frommer, which is identical in size to the .32 ACP, but load...

The All-American 2000 was Colt's attempt to compete with Glock for the military and police service pistol market. It had a polymer frame (except a few early ones with aluminum frames), a double-action-only striker firing system, double-stack magazines, and used a rotating barrel to lock. The desi...

2000 fps footage of a C96 "Broomhandle" Mauser pistol, chambered in 7.63mm Mauser. This was the first really successful commercial automatic pistol, and uses a short recoil action to operate.

I was looking through our reference library yesterday, and realized that we hadn't mentioned at Hatcher's Notebook before - which is a glaring oversight. Julian S. Hatcher (Captain Hatcher during WWI, and Major General Hatcher by WWII) was a presence in the US Ordnance Department for nearly 30 ye...

I'm joined today by Jari, the CEO of Varusteleka to talk about one of the pieces of gear we both used in Lynx Brutality: Varusteleka's new Low Visibility Plate Carrier. It's designed to keep the shoulder straps tight in toward the neck and minimize weight, bulk, and profile - and it worked very w...

The CETME-L was Spain's replacement for the CETME Modelo C, which was the 7.62x51mm rifle that was essentially adopted by Germany as the G3 in the 1950s. By the 1980s Spain needed to move to the new NATO standard caliber, 5.56x45mm. A domestic design was preferred, so rather than but HK-93 rifles...

By the beginning of 1945, the Nazi government in Germany was looking to find cheaper ways to equip the Volksturm, and solicited bids and designs from several major arms manufacturers. The Steyr company created a crude but effective version of the Mauser 98 which was dubbed the VK-98 or VG-5. Mech...

As World War One stagnated into trench warfare, snipers and machine guns quickly proliferated, and exposure above the parapet of one's trench could be extremely hazardous. This leaves one with the question of, how to shoot back without risking a bullet?

One answer that was devised was to mount...

There was not much industrial production the the Confederate States of America during the US Civil War, and Confederate-made revolvers have been very collectible for a very long time. Today we're taking a look at three such revolvers made by a series of companies that evolved throughout the war. ...

With the advent of aircraft, marksmanship instruction gained a huge new element of complexity. Now there were gunners firing at rapidly moving aerial targets from the ground and worse, gunners in moving aircraft shooting at other moving aircraft! Classic shotgun sports were often used to train gu...

Paul Mauser was very persistent - if ultimately unsuccessful - in his long-tim goal to create a practical semiautomatic rifle using a full-power cartridge. In total he tried some 17 different designs, including one in 1901 which suffered a burst casing during test firing and cost him an eye.

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Ferdinand von Mannlicher was a brilliant and prolific European gun designer with more than a few widely-adopted military arms to his name. One of his very last guns was this carbine, which was also one of the first intermediate cartridge carbines developed. It was a mostly experimental gun, and n...

The Type 89 grenade discharger, commonly known as the "knee mortar" was a Japanese light infantry weapon introduced in 1929 which blurs the lines between grenade launcher and mortar. Like a mortar, it fires propelled explosive bombs in a high-angle indirect fire role, but it has a rifled barrel a...

The Holek Automat was a semiautomatic sporting rifle designed by Emmanuel Holek. Emmanuel was also the designer of the ZH-29 rifle, and brother of Vaclav and Franticek Holek, who developed the ZB-26 and ZB-53 machine guns. Emmanuel left the Brno factory to run his own gun shop, where he offered (...

The Confederate States of America didn't have very much capacity for manufacturing small arms, and was happy to purchase guns from anyone who could make them. Among others who got into the gun-making business during the Civil War were the Dance brothers of Texas. They only managed to produce betw...