Today I'm speaking with retired Master Sergeant John Keene, the NFA export for Morphy's. John is a machine gun collector himself, and between this and his work with Morphy's he has exceptional experience and expertise. So we have a slate of questions for him from Patrons:

0:00 - Introduction
0:2...

The Maxim Gun was the first successful true machine gun, and it became extremely popular worldwide. Maxim sent his first two working models to Enfield for testing in 1887, and by 1889 he had what he termed the "World Standard" model. No two contracts were quite identical, as the gun was constantl...

The Colt Model 1903, aka Pocket Hammerless, aka Model M, was a massively successful design for Colt on the commercial market. It was chambered for the .32ACP cartridge, with a .380 model introduced in 1908. During World War Two, the US government took an interest in the pistol. A total of 17,330 ...

The Portative was an attempt by the Hotchkiss company to make a light machine gun companion to their heavy model (which had found significant commercial success). The Portative used the same feed strips, albeit loaded upside down, and the same gas piston operation, but a very different locking sy...

Venezuela was the First Nation to purchase the FN-49 rifle, before even the Belgian military. In fact, the Venezuelan contract was signed in 1948, before the "FN-49" designation was even in place. Venezuela bought a total of 8,012 rifles in two batches - 4,000 rifles plus 12 cutaway training exam...

Charles H. Ballard is much better known for his single shot rifle design, but he also designed, patented, and produced a .41 rimfire caliber derringer. These were popular concealed weapons during the 19th century, and remain in production even today (though no longer in .41 rimfire...). Productio...

The Breda Model 37 was Italy's standard heavy machine gun (which meant a rifle-caliber gun fired only from a tripod) during World War Two. It was chambered for the 8x59mm cartridge, as Italy used a two-cartridge system at the time, with 6.5mm for rifles and the heavier 8mm for machine guns to ex...

Cossack forces have long been a key cavalry element of the Russian military, and this did not change during the Soviet era. The Cossacks had their own rather distinctive style of sword, the shashka, and the Red Army maintained the tradition of issuing them to Cossack cavalry troopers. In 1927, a ...

Contrary to what you might expect, Mauser was actually the last company to produce a fully automatic model of the C96 "broomhandle" pistol. The C96 was very popular in China (Mauser sent hundreds of thousands of them to China) and Spanish firms like Bestigui Hermanos and Astra jumped at the chanc...

When Colt decided that it wanted a piece of the Derringer market, it used a tactic we are used to seeing today: it found an existing manufacturer and just bought them outright. This was the National Firearms Company, which was manufacturing a Derringer designed by Daniel Moore in 1861. Moore made...

FN played a role in the production of Polish wz.28 BARs, and in the process obtained a copy of the technical package for the weapon, and converted it to metric measurements. Under the supervision of Dieudonne Saive, this was used as the basis for FN's own BAR production, called the Modelé 30. Pro...

First produced in 1902, the Madsen was one of the first practical light machine guns, and it remained in production for nearly 5 decades. The Madsen system is a rather unusual recoil-operated mechanism with a tilting bolt and a remarkably short receiver. The most unusual variation on the system w...

The “Guycot” is a rocket ball chain rifle system named for its two creators, Paulin Gay (the designer) and Henri Guénot (the financier). They patented the idea in 1879, and manufactured it in both rifle and pistol form - I have a previous video on one of the pistols and today we are looking at tw...

During the Croatian Homeland War - as in all wars of independence - a wide variety of cobbled-together firearms were used by people who could not access proper factory arms for one reason or another. Today I'm as the Sisal Municipal Museum looking at four different examples from specifically the ...

#1: The AK is copied from the Sturmgewehr

#2: Mattel made M16s

#3: Chinese jackets in Korea stopped .30 Carbine rounds

0:00 Introduction and discussion on the Lynx Brutality match in Slovenia
0:28 Debunking and comparison of firearm myths: AK vs Sturmgewehr
3:11 The history and development of ...

Gevarm was the gun-making subsidiary of Gevelot, a long-standing French ammunition manufacturer. In 1956 they brought a simple new submachine gun to market. It was chambered for 9mm Parabellum, with a simple blowback action. The construction was very basic, a combination of a tube receiver, stamp...

The SAFN, aka FN-49, is one of the classic post-war European battle rifles, and was sold to nine different countries in the early 1950s before the FAL became FN's primary combat rifle offering. What is often forgotten is that despite being limited to a fixed 10-round magazine, nearly half of all ...

The Zastava M51 is a prototype Yugoslav submachine gun developed before the adoption of the M56. It uses elements of the Beretta M38 (namely the captive recoil spring system) and PPSh-41 (the selector switch and magazine well) along with a collapsing stock reminiscent of the Polish PM63 machine p...

Yesterday we looked at the history and mechanics of the South African Vektor SS-77 general purpose machine gun, and today I have it out at the range to do some shooting. It's really as nice of a gun as I had expected from taking it apart - controllable and comfortable to shoot. I would put this u...

In the 1970s, South Africa began looking for a domestic-production GMPG to replace its inventory of FN MAG machine guns. The MAG was an excellent weapon, but the ones in South Africa were getting old and worn out, and with the country under international embargo over Apartheid, new guns and parts...

We just looked at the Rasheed (and it's Iraqi sibling the Baghdad) and today I'm taking it out to the monthly 2-Gun match. I'm pairing it with a United Arab Republic contract Browning High Power, and some period Egyptian camouflage. Fun!

Unfortunately, the Rasheed gave me a number of malfunction...

Today we are taking a look at an assortment of gas-delayed pistols, from South Africa to China to Europe. There is one predominant style of gas-delay execution, but also some variations and some substantially different takes on the concept...

When the original Laugo Alien came out, it was designed with a grip angle rather steeper than a lot of people (including most Americans, it seems) preferred. In response, Laugo redesigned the grip to be more like a 1911, and made the whole grip assembly modular in the process. Original magazines ...

Today I'm taking the new Laugo Alien out to the range to see if it matches up to the original. Spoiler, it does - and it's even better. The new grip angle is much more natural for me, and the trigger is actually a bit better than the original...