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...

I have previously done some video on the 1893 Bittner manually repeating pistol, but I have not had one of the original clips for them before. So, that's what we're going to take a quick look at today!

This is a commercial pump-action shotgun manufactured in France and proofed at the St Etienne proof house. I know basically nothing else of its provenance, including who designed it, who sold it (although I would assume Manufrance...) or when it was in production (assuming it did get into serial ...

Today we are taking a look at an early production M1891 Mosin Nagant rifle. This one has had quite a busy history...it was originally manufactured at the Izhevsk Arsenal in 1894, with several of the features of a very early M91 (like the palm rest on the trigger guard and the sling swivel on the ...

The Winchester 1866 was chambered for the .44 Henry rimfire cartridge, like the Henry rifle before it. Before too long, however, centerfire ammunition began to take over as the best and most common type of cartridge. The Model 1866 continued to sell for decades, but some buyers wanted to use cent...

The pre-war Beretta Model 38A was a magnificent SMG, but it included a fair number of fancy elements that would prove to costly to justify once wartime production needs grew. Beretta would simplify the design progressively over the course of the war. What we have today is a Model 38/42 with a muc...

The Beretta Model 38A was an outstanding SMG at the beginning of World War Two, loaded with features and very easy to shoot. However, it was expensive and complex to produce, and pressures of war forced Beretta to progressively simplify its construction. This happened incrementally, but the most ...

In 1942, the US Navy adopted the Mk22 Pedestal mount, which fitted a pair of water-cooled Browning M2 machine guns (one left-hand feed and one right-hand). It was used for antiaircraft use primarily, and was also adopted by the Army as the M46 in 1943. The mount was an update to the previous sing...

Carbines made by the Columbus Armory are particularly scarce, and their history is not really well understood. They were manufactured by John Gray of Columbus SC, whose brother William Gray was a partner in another (better documented) Georgia arms factory under the director of J.P. Murray. John G...

When the German Army wanted a new semiauto service rifle in 1941, it received submissions from two companies; Walther and Mauser. Walther’s design didn’t strictly meet the criteria set forth, but it was clearly the better rifle and would eventually win the competition. This involved conducting tr...

While the Johnson LMG was issued in limited quantities throughout World War Two, notably to Marine Raiders, Paramarines, and the 1st Special Service Force, the US never issued web gear made for its uniquely-sized magazines. However, a small number of 12-magazine backpacks for the Johnson did find...

During the 1970s and 1980s, Colt wanted to sell not just standard M16 rifle and CAR-15 carbines to foreign military customers, but also wanted to supply support weapons. They put together the Model 621, aka M16A1 “HBAR” (Heavy Barreled Assault Rifle - not the same idea and the HBAR target rifles ...

One would think that the Shpagin PPSh-41 was as simple as a submachine gun could get, but that wasn’t the case in World War Two USSR. Barely had the PPSh gotten into real production than the Army was looking for something even simpler. An answer came from young designer Aleksey Sudaev with a comp...

In 1886, the Remington company fell into financial insolvency. It was reorganized as the Remington Arm Co under the leadership of Marcellus Hartley, and in 1890 the company made an attempt to compete once again with Colt. Remington introduced the Model 1890, which was essentially their tried-and-...

Police in inter-war Germany used a variety of submachine guns, and sometimes added a distinctive extra safety mechanism to them. No patent or documentation ha been uncovered (that I am aware of, anyway), but the exact same device is found on gun from the MP18,I through the MP40, including the MP3...

The Johnson LMG was adopted by the US Marine Corps for specialist units like Paramarines and Raiders, and saw use in some of the fiercest island campaign of the Pacific (in addition to use in Europe by the 1st Special Service Force and others). It was a light and hard-hitting weapon that was well...

In 1977, the US military adopted the FN MAG as the M240 in vehicular configuration to replace the less-than-successful M73/M219 machine guns. The USMC would get an early start adapting the 240 to ground configuration (the M240G), but it wasn’t until 1995 that the Army formally replaced the M60 wi...

A crash program to produce the PPD 34/38 after the initial battles of the Winter War, even as the improved PPD 40 was being rapidly developed. These are very rare gun today, and we have the chance to take the example out to the range and see how it handles...

Yesterday we looked at the history of the PPS-42 and how it was developed into the much more common PPS-43. Today we are taking it out to the range - the only time one of these very scarce gun has been filmed in recent history.

The US Army spent nearly 16 years languidly testing the Maxim gun, but was never willing to actually make a decision until a final trial in 1903 finally settled the matter. The Maxim was deemed the bet available machine gun and a contract was signed with Vickers, Sons, & Maxim to purchase 50 (lat...