Thanks to Alex C. at TheFirearmBlog, I recently had an opportunity to do some shooting with a .276 caliber Vickers-Pedersen model PB rifle. This was one of the very first rifles Vickers built when they though the Pedersen would be adopted by the US military and couple be further marketed worldwid...

Colette was a Belgian gun manufacturer that made this interesting parlor pistol. It used a rocketball type of cartridge, in which the powder and primer were encased in the hollow base of the bullet to make a caseless cartridge. The gravity pistol was named for its gravity feed mechanism and its 2...

Pretty much every major military had an antitank rifle in service when WW2 kicked off, and the British example was the Boys rifle, named after the Captain Boys who designed it. It was a bolt action .55 caliber rifle with 5-round detachable magazines. If was obsolete by 1943 and replaced by the mo...

Bergmann was one of the reasonably successful yet relatively unknown manufacturers of early automatic pistols. Originally a delayed blowback patent purchased by Bergmann, the design was refined and simplified by none other than Louis Schmeisser into the 1896 Bergmann, in three different calibers ...

Mike Krause of San Mateo, California makes some gorgeous reproduction Luger pistols, including copies of the extremely rare .32ACP "baby" Lugers. Unfortunately, we didn't have much luck with this particular one on the range. Still, I figured it would be of some interest to watch a couple malfunct...

Before 1934, there was no legal restriction on short-barreled shotguns, and several companies offered pistol-style shotguns for personal protection. One of the best of these was the Ithaca Auto & Burglar. These were made mostly in 20ga, but could also be ordered in .410, 16ga, or even 12ga. They ...

The ASP was a custom take of the S&W Model 39 autoloading pistol developed by a man named Paris Theodore in the 1970s. Theodore made a wide variety of sneaky James-Bond-like guns for various clients, but is best know for the ASP. At the time, it was one of the best options for a subcompact pistol...

The Walther MP was an all-stamped submachine gun developed in the late 1950s, and available in long (MPL) and short (MPK) versions. It is an open-bolt, blowback design, but uses a somewhat innovative bolt in which most of the mass is located above and in front of the chamber, to reduce bolt trave...

Switzerland was an early adopter of the Luger pistol as a standard military sidearm, but by WWII that design was becoming obsolete and the Swiss began looking for a newer sidearm. Several lines of development were pursued, and we have examples of two of them here: the W+F Bern P43 and the SIG P44...

The Scotti Model X (the X standing for the 10th year of the Italian Fascist era, or 1932) was one of a bunch of semiauto rifles tested by the Italian military during the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Scotti entry into these competitions was chambered for the 6.5mm Carcano cartridge and used sta...

Today's slow motion video is a Mauser Schnellfeuer; the full-auto version of the C96 pistol made in the 1930s. Just over 100,000 of these were made, with the great majority being sold in China. It is chambered for 7.63mm Mauser, firing at 1120rpm (using Prvi Partisan ammo) from 10- and 20-round d...

The 32-round snail drum (or as it was properly known, the trommelmagazin 08) was developed in 1916 to give increased firepower to units armed with the LangePistole 08, or artillery Luger. These pistols were also used by stormtroopers prior to the introduction of the first submachine guns (which, ...

I had a cool Swiss viewer named Bjoern kindly send me this footage of a Swiss LMG25 machine gun firing - thanks, Bjoern! These guns are very rare in the US, and the only one I've been able to handle was in Europe. If I can ever get my hands on one myself, I will make some video with my Edgertroni...

Even the legendary Elmer Keith started out as a total newbie to shooting and reloading, and blew up a gun with wildly dangerous handloads in 1923. I got my hands on the remnants of the cylinder from that gun, and I think we can learn a couple important things from it...

Thanks to James D. Juli...

It's fairly common today to see .22 caliber versions of larger firearms, marketed to folks who don't want to spend as much for either the gun or its ammunition. For example, the ATI Sturmgewehrs, the Beretta ARX-160, and the GSG AK and MP5 lookalikes in .22 rimfire. Well, it's not a new trend - v...

The Czech Samopal vz. 26 was one of a family of submachine guns (the vz 23-26) that pioneered the use of bolts telescoped out forward over the barrel, allowing guns to have much better ratios of barrel to receiver length than before. The guns actually have quite a few interesting mechanical detai...

In 1936 or 1937, the BSW company (Berlin-Suhler Waffenwerk) produced a small number of prototype pistols for German Army trials. These trials were eventually won by the Walther P38, and for good reason in this case. The pistol BSW submitted was a gas-accelerated blowback design, with an aluminum ...

The Remington 870 is one of the most popular shotguns ever made, but some trap shooters decided they preferred the lighter recoil of the gas-operated Model 1100. This gave someone at Remington the idea to replace the 870's magazine tube with a gas piston much like that in the 1100, which could ac...

The StG-45(M) was developed by engineers at Mauser right at the end of WWII, and its designers went on to form Heckler & Koch and this rifle was their basis for the H&K roller-delayed blowback series of weapons (HK91, HK33, HK53, HK21, MP5, etc). Twenty sets of parts for the StG-45(M) were produc...

I have been spending this past week at the Rock Island Auction Company. I posted a few photos on Facebook, and had someone request a video. Well...why not? So I put together a brief tour of the place. This coming auction will have about 6,500 guns for sale, and that makes for some pretty impressi...

When the Germans occupied Norway, they took advantage of the arms production facilities at the Kongsberg Arsenal to make a number of Krag rifles to their own specifications. They were made with a mixture of new parts and existing rifles, and all retained the Norwegian 6.5x55mm chambering. The Ger...

At the turn of the 20th Century, prior to World War I, there were actually three semiauto sporting rifles on the market in the US. The two commonly known ones are the Winchester Model 5/7/10 and the Remington Model 8 - much less recognized is the Standard Arms Model G. It was a rifle that could b...

It did not take long for some of the handling problems of the model 1879 Reichsrevolver to become apparent, and the result was a redesign to the model of 1883. These new guns retained the exact same lockwork was the 1879 pattern, but with a shorter barrel and redesigned frame and grip. The 1883 m...

We are used to German small arms being highly efficient and modern for their times, but the Reichsrevolver is an exception to that trend. The first centerfire adopted by the newly formed German empire, the model 1879 Reichsrevolver had traits we would typically associate with Russian arms rather ...