In the mid/late 1960s, Colt was manufacturing AR-15 rifles and wanted to supply light machine guns to go with them - so they developed the CMG-2 ("Colt's Machine Gun"). The CMG-2 competed against the Stoner 63 in trials for the Navy SEALs (among others), and narrowly lost out. It was a very well ...

The M1915 CSRG, commonly called the Chauchat after its primary designer, has a reputation as the worst gun ever put into military service. That reputation, however, is not deserved. It was not a great weapon, but it was a very serviceable gun for its day. The French needed a light automatic rifle...

During World War One, Birmingham Small Arms (aka BSA) grew into a massive arms manufacturing facility to supply the previously inconceivable military appetite for rifles. When the war ended, they were left with a bit of a dilemma. As a private entity, what were they to do with such a huge product...

The Bren Ten is an interesting story of handgun development and business failure. The gun was first developed by Dornaus & Dixon, with the consulting help of the iconic Col. Jeff Cooper. It was intended to be a handgun to improve upon the venerable 1911 in every way.

To satisfy the adherents ...

I really don't have much I can say about this one - beyond it being made in Paris by Lefaucheux, I don't know anything about it's history or development. I do know that I have never seen another shotgun with this type of action, though...

The Adler is a unique little pocket pistol built in pre-WWI Germany.Not much is known about it, as only about a hundred were manufactured and they failed to be a commercial success. The design is a simple blowback one, using a proprietary 7.25mm cartridge. However, the disassembly method is prett...

The Wesson & Leavitt is one of the scarcest revolving rifles made in the US, with no more than 50 made (some sources say only 16). The reason for this is that the Dragoon revolver which Wesson & Leavitt based the rifle on was found to be in violation of several Colt patents. Most importantly, whe...

Germany was the first country to produce a purpose-built antitank rifle, in response to the major Entente tank attack at Cambrai. The design was pretty simple, basically a scaled-up Mauser 98 with 4 locking lugs chambered for the massive 13.2mm TuF cartridge. It would perforate about 20mm of armo...

The Warner carbine was another of the weapons used in small numbers by the Union cavalry during the Civil War. It is a pivoting breechblock action built on a brass frame. These carbines were made in two batches, known as the Greene and Springfield. The first guns were chambered for a proprietary...

The FN Model 1903 was a Belgian-made scaled-up version of John Browning's model 1903 pocket hammerless pistol. The pocket hammerless was made in .32 ACP and .380 calibers for (primarily) the civilian market in the US by Colt, and the FN model was chambered for the more powerful 9x20mm Browning Lo...

Sylvester Roper is not a well known name in firearms history today, but he made a number of notable contributions to the field - in addition to his work with motorcycles and automobiles where he is much better remembered.

The Roper revolving shotgun was an early cartridge-firing repeating sho...

The model of 1885 (a modern collector designation; Remington called these the "Remington Magazine Rifle" and did not differentiate between the different versions) was the final iteration of James Paris Lee's bolt action rifle made by Remington. It incorporated a number of improvements from the ea...

When we think of James Paris Lee, we usually think of the British family of Lee-Enfield rifles. However, the US Navy actually adopted an early version of Lee's action before the British, in 1879. In addition, this rifle was the first use of the detachable box magazine, a patented invention of Lee...

The Type 96 and Type 99 Nambu light machine guns were arguably the best LMGs used by any nation during WWII - they were light, handy, accurate, durable, and reliable. Designed by Kijiro Nambu to replace his 1922 Type 11 LMG (which was fed by a unique hopper mechanism using 5-round rifle stripper ...

We have done a number of videos recently on various different Pedersen long guns (the PA rifle, the Japanese copy, shooting the PB rifle, etc), but there was one version that I have not covered yet (aside from the US trials rifles). That's the Vickers factory PA carbine. Only a small number of th...

The Merwin & Hulbert company was a short-lived firearms manufacturing partnership between designer Joseph Merwin and the Hulbert brothers as financiers. Merwin wanted to design a particularly strong and high-quality revolver, and he succeeded - his guns are arguably some of the best revolvers of ...

The M14E2, later redesignated the M14A1, was the replacement for the ill-fated heavy barrel M15 rifle. Both were intended to fill the role of the BAR in providing automatic fire in support of M14 rifles. The M15 program was cancelled before any rifles were built, and the M14E2 that replaced it wa...

The Menz Liliput is one of the smallest functional firearms ever put into mass production. It was offered in 4.25mm (.17 caliber) in addition to the more popular .25ACP and .32ACP. The 4.25mm cartridge is used generated about 17 foot pounds of muzzle energy - trivial by most pistol standards, but...

The Belgian Army held rifle trials in the late 1880s to choose a new infantry rifle, and the winner was the Model 1889 Belgian Mauser. Quite a few different guns were involved in the competition though, including this Engh-patent rifle made by Liegeoise. It's a pretty unusual bolt action that is ...

The High Standard Model 10A and 10B were a pair of bullpup police shotguns produced for about 10 years in the late 1960s and 1970s. They were built around a regular High Standard semiautomatic shotgun action, which was put into a plastic chassis to give it a bullpup configuration. They were chamb...

The Hotchkiss Revolving Cannon was developed in the 1870s as a competitor to the other manually-operated machine guns of the era, guns like the Gatling, Gardner, and Nordenfelt to name a few. What made the Hotchkiss stand out is that while the other guns were mostly built in rifle calibers, with ...

The Gyrojet was one of the more creative and one of the most futuristic firearms innovations of the last few decades - unfortunately it wasn't able to prove sustainable on the market.

The idea was to use burning rocket fuel to launch projectiles, instead of pressurized gas. The advantage was t...

I have been really enjoying The Great War series, so I figured I ought to take advantage of an opportunity to look at several WWI heavy machine guns side by side. This is a video to give some historical context to the guns, and not a technical breakdown of exactly how they work (that will come la...

When the German military started looking for a self-loading rifle in the late 1930s, they had a pretty strict set of requirements. Most significantly, the rifles could not have gas ports or recoiling barrels, could not have moving parts on top of the action, and had to be capable of being operate...