Maxim lMG 08/15 Zeppelin Gun

The Winchester Model 94 is one of the most iconic American sporting rifles ever made, and this particular one is chambered in the equally iconic .30-30 cartridge. It is a takedown version, made in 1907, and most interestingly of all, it comes with a legal and registered original Maxim Silencer. ...

In the buildup to the US War of Independence, "Committees of Safety" were organized in the colonial state to form shadow governments for the independence movement. These committees (our councils, as a few were named) had, among other tasks, the responsibility of sourcing arms for the local militi...

This prototype Webley was one of just under 1,000 Model 1910 pistols produced by the company in an effort to get some military and police interest in their .38/9mm automatics. It was tested by a number of organizations (including, notably, the London Metropolitan Police) but not adopted by any. T...

Formally adopted in 1877, the I.C.1 Martini Henry was formally designated the "Arms Interchangeable, Carbine Breech loading Rifled, with clearing rod Martini Henry Mk1". The word "interchangeable" refers to its use for both the artillery and cavalry services, instead of needing a separate design ...

Margolin .22 Target Pistols

The Model 1904 was basically the first working automatic pistol made by Webley (there was a 1903 toolroom experiment, but it didn't really work). Like all the Webley automatic that would follow, it was designed by William Whiting. The 1904 was the company's first effort at making a semiautomatic ...

Thanks to web site reader John D, we have a chance today to look at a very scarce Danish-made copy of the AG-42B Ljungman rifle. The Madsen company in Denmark made about 50 of these rifles for military trials, in several different calibers. This one, and a few others, were imported with a batch o...

The M50 was one of a series of submachine guns developed and marketed by the Danish Madsen company after World War II. The first was the M46 (1946), followed by M50 and the M53. Each version was progressively a bit better than the last, but they never sold particularly well because of the easy an...

The M1908 Mondragon is widely acknowledged to have been the first self-loading rifle adopted as a standard infantry arm by a national military force. There are a couple earlier designs used by military forces, but the Mondragon was the first really mass-produced example and deserves its place in ...

I didn't have the opportunity to do a full video with the folks who own this M18 Hellcat, but I did get some footage of it firing. Enjoy!

The first US military night vision system used in active combat was the T3 Carbine system - an infrared light-amplifying scope and IR floodlight mounted on an M1 Carbine. About 150 of these were used on Okinawa, and were quite effective. The system was refined over time, and by the Korean War thi...

Today we're looking at a pair of military survival rifles. One is a Luftwaffe M30 drilling - the most finely finished and luxurious survival rifle ever issued by a military force. The other is a US Air Force M6 survival gun - spartan and utilitarian - the polar opposite of the M30.

On this day 138 years ago, the combined forces of the Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho tribes delivered a staggering defeat to the US Army's 7th Cavalry under the command of General George Armstrong Custer. The battle was glorified in the East for largely political reasons in its immediate aftermath ...

Colonel LeMat is best known for his 9-shot muzzleloading .42 caliber revolver with its 20 gauge shot barrel acting as cylinder axis pin - several thousand of these revolvers were imported and used in the field by Confederate officers during the US Civil War (and modern reproductions are available...

The 1875 Lee Vertical Action was an experimental rifle designed by James Paris Lee (of Lee Enfield and Lee Navy fame) as an idea to increase the rate of fire from single-shot Army rifles. He touted an impressive 30 rounds in 45 seconds with the rifle, thanks to several design elements that combin...

Charles Lancaster was a master London gunsmith who made 2-barrel and 4-barrel pistols in a variety of British revolver cartridges (commonly known as Howdah pistols). Many of his pistols was purchased privately by British military officers, explorers, and big-game hunters to use as backup weapons ...

Taking a look at another artillery piece today, a 50mm mountain gun made for Siam (now Thailand) by the German Krupp company. It is a relatively simple (and thus relatively inexpensive at the time) design, with no recoil mechanism or adjustable traverse.

Today's item is a very cool piece - a German Sturmgewehr with a "krummlauf", or curved barrel attachment. This is the 30 degree type, intended (as goofy as this sounds) for firing around corners and over barricades in urban combat. A 90-degree version was also made for use in armored vehicles.

This prototype 1895 Krnka automatic pistol, serial number 7, was the first in the developmental line that led to the 1907 Roth-Steyr cavalry pistol.

As the Second World War started to really take a toll on German industrial production, several companies started to work on alternatives to the P38 handgun in an effort to reduce production cost and time. This is one such example made by Walther, with a normal type of milled slide and an experime...

They Type 26 was an indigenous Japanese revolver introduced in 1893 (26th year of the Meiji era) to replace the Smith & Wesson No. 3 in Japanese military service. In many ways the Type 26 was akin to the other military revolvers of the day, like the Russian (and Belgian) Nagant, the French M1892,...

Thanks to the hospitality of the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, we had a chance to examine and disassemble a Type 11 light machine gun, chambered for 6.5mm Japanese. This is, of course, the very unusual hopper-fed design from Kijiro Nambu, which entered service in 1922. The action is largel...

Before standardizing on the Type 2 paratroop rifle (a 7.7mm Arisaka that broke in half at the chamber), the Japanese military tested a variant of the Type 38 carbine with a folding stock retrofitted into place. Very few of these were made.