I'm excited today to speak with Neil Vermillion, a US Army veteran (2002-2006) who served contracts in Kurdistan (2016) and Ukraine (2022) for the nonprofit PMC Sons of Liberty International. In Kurdistan he was a volunteer training and fighting with a group of Kurds around Erbil and Mosul. In Uk...

Final prices for the May 2022 Morphy auction. The short version is, hold on to your wallets! Yowza!

During World War Two, both German and Russian soldiers often thought that the other side's weapons were better than their own. In particular, both sides often preferred their opponents' SMGs. In late 1941, a group of German officers formally requested that Germany simply copy and produce the PPSh...

Today we are out at the range to compare the Angstadt Arms MDP-9 to the classic H&K SP-5. We will do a bunch of runs on a course of fire that incudes precision targets, spinners and stars, and see which of the carbines comes out ahead! Plus, as a bonus, some shooting with a suppressor and subsoni...

I expected the MPi-69 to be a rather difficult gun to shoot well, with its very simple construction and wire stock, but I was pleasantly surprised on the range. The rate of fire is quite low, and it was easy to hold on target. Furthermore, the intent of the cocking handle locking piece became cle...

One interesting specialized version of the Steyr MPi-81 is this model, built for the Steyr/Saurer 4K 7FA armored personnel carrier. The vehicle could carry 8 infantrymen and their compartment had four firing ports fitted with MPi-81 SMGs. The changes required from the standard MPi-81 pattern were...

After World War Two, when West Germany was allowed to reconstitute its army and join NATO, it needed small arms. The new Bundeswehr chose the MG42 as it’s standard GPMG, and the Rheinmetall firm undertook the project of recreating the technical data package to build them. The work was completed i...

The MG 08/18 was developed at the very end of World War One as a lighter alternative to the MG 08/15. It used an air-cooled barrel, and between not needing water and having lighter parts it managed to be about 6 pounds less weight than the 08/15. Only a few hundred appear to have been produced be...

Rafael Mendoza was Mexico’s premier domestic arms designer, and the Model 1934 LMG is probably his most successful design. He began work on it in 1929, and it entered testing with the Mexican Army in 1932. It was formally accepted by the Mexican Army in 1934 (hence the designation) and would serv...

In the late 1980s, the Spanish gunmaker Star decided to join the new hot trend of 10mm semiauto pistols. The cartridge was getting a lot of press, and Star saw this as an opportunity too ride the wave and also the get a pistol on the market that would attract IPSC competitors. Unlike some compani...

The MDR has been out in the market for five years now, and DesertTech has been making some improvements. The current production model I called the MDRX, to denote several incremental improvements that have been made to the system. The gas block now has drainage holes, the polymer blend has been s...

Immediately upon the liberation of France in 1944, the French military began a process of developing a whole new suite of small arms. As it applied to SMGs, the desire was for a design in 9mm Parabellum (no more 7.65mm French Long), with an emphasis on something light, handy, and foldable. All th...

The United States Army entered World War Two with neither sniper rifles nor a sniper training program. As troops began to see combat, requests began to come back to the War Department that both were urgently needed. The newly-adopted dM1 Garand rifle was going to be a bit tricky to mount optics o...

One of the problems with using suppressors on machine guns is that suppressors or generally much more susceptible to heat buildup than the guns themselves. In 2019, US SOCOM put out a request for a suppressor that could handle a 600 round belt dump on an M240 machine gun. Radical Defense responde...

When the Yugoslav Peoples' Army began AK development, they produced the M64 infantry rifle and the M65 support weapon. The M65 had a longer and heavier profile barrel and a bipod - and in its very early experimental iterations a quick-change barrel mechanism and a folding carry handle. By the tim...

One of the very nice features of the FAMAS is that it can be swapped between left-hand and right-hand ejection in just a few moments without needing any tools or spare parts. I had this FAMAS out at the range in left-handed configuration and the owner asked me to return it as a right-handed gun, ...

When Taiwan decided to move from the M14 platform (the Type 57 in Taiwanese service) to a 5.56mm rifle, they decided to develop a domestic gas-piston version of the AR. Development began in 1973, with prototypes ready in 1975 and the system formally adopted in 1976. Using the Chinese calendar bas...

Today we have a very odd BSA prototype Long Lee rifle. The details of its production are unknown, but it has good provenance; the Charnwood Ordnance collection. What makes the rifle unusual is a unique style of split charger guide unlike either the SMLE type fixed guides or the earlier CLLE guide...

The creation of a short and handy Mosin Nagant carbine to complement the standard M891 was prompted by the Russo-Japanese War. Lots of Russian troops with roles other than infantry - machine gun and artillery crews in particular - were unnecessarily burdened with full length rifles, and the Model...

The Arizona PCC (Pistol-Caliber Carbine) Championship is a 10-stage competition held every year at the Rio Salado Sportsman's Club in Mesa, AZ. It is normally only open to semiauto carbines, but I was able to get permission to run a true submachine gun this year (full auto is truly not an advanta...

Here's a rifle with an interesting twisting history...

This began life as a German military Gewehr 71/84, made in 1888. It was issued to a unit, but eventually replaced by the Gewehr 1888. It was sold to the Francis Bannerman company at some point around 1900, as part of a big batch of surplus...

Today I'm at the BackUp Gun Match in Tucson with a first model Le Français made in 1923. This is an early French semiauto pistol design intended for pocket carry. It has a 7-round magazine and a tip-up barrel, so that one need not ever manually rack the slide. It's very compact, very light, and s...

Schiffer Military History has a line of short (80 page) hardcover books they call "Classic Guns of the World", and one of the recent additions to it is Llc Guillou's "The MAT-49 Submachine Gun and Preceding French Submachine Gun Designs Including the MAS-35". It really should be called just "Fren...

James Rupley and Larry Vickers have released a second edition of their Vickers Guide: 1911 book, and it is a massive expansion on the original printing. The gorgeous photography remains as good as ever, but the book is now two volumes, with more than 150 pistols and nearly 850 total pages. It was...