Yesterday we looked at the mechanics and the history of the Sten Mk4(S), and today we have it out at the range! The very short barrel and its porting reduce the velocity of standard 115gr 9mm ammunition below the speed of sound, and so the gun is very quiet. To my surprise, the complete lack of c...

The first production version of the FG42 used a fantastically complex milled receiver and a distinctive sharply swept-back pistol grip. A contract to make 5,000 of them was awarded to Krieghoff in late spring of 1943, but by the fall its replacement was already well into development. The milled r...

The Norwegian Kongsberg factory has a history of making firearms-based tools for maritime use, and one of the more recent is the M52 line-throwing gun, introduced in the 1950s and sold through the 1970s. It uses a repurposed Mauser action paired with a new smoothbore barrel and a 12mm blank cartr...

Yesterday we looked at the history and the mechanics of the Soviet heavy machine guns from World War Two, the DShK-38. Today, we are taking it out to the range!

The FN CAL (Carabine Automatique Legere) was Fabrique Nationale's first attempt at a 5.56mm rifle, and it was not successful. They replaced it with the FNC, which saw much wider success. The CAL is quite scarce today, and it was a very cool opportunity to take one out to the range! It performed r...

In 1925 the USSR began a program to develop a heavy machine gun for antiaircraft use. After some initial experimentation with a converted Dreyse machine gun, they brought in Degtyarev to scale up his recently-adopted light machine gun to the task. Degtyarev’s first design was ready in 1930, and u...

When the Bundeswehr chose its small arms after World War Two, it saw non reason to move away from the iconic MG-42...but the new weapons needed to be in NATO standard calibers. And so the MG-3 was born: an MG-42 improved in several small ways and rechambered for the 7.62x51mm NATO round. Today we...

The Sten Mk4 was developed experimentally in 1943 for use by British paratroops. It used a remarkably awful folding stock along with a shortened receiver and barrel to make a very compact package - albeit one that must have been very uncomfortable to shoot. Several different models were made, wit...

When the French Army adopted the Mle 1892 revolver, it was a huge improvement over the previous standard from 1873. The new sidearm has a swing-out cylinder, simultaneous ejection, was lighter, and used a high-tech new small bore smokeless powder cartridge. With Army adoption came a tremendous in...

The town of Dara Adam Khel has became a locus of firearms manufacture in response to the British occupation of Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 19th century, and it has remained dedicated to that industry to the present day. While much of the firearms manufacturing there is done to a much higher s...

This is a unique and interesting German proofed .22 rimfire target pistol. It uses a simple blowback slide, which locks open after each shot. It is striker fired, with a 12-inch barrel and a quite nice trigger. The top of the receiver is marked “Alk” in a fancy script engraving, and also has a pa...

In 1865, brothers William and George Miller of Meriden CT patented a system to convert percussion muskets to use the new Rimfire ammunition that was becoming available. Between 1865 and 1867, the local Meridan Manufacturing Company converted 2,000 surplus US Model 1861 muskets (mostly made by Par...

When the Bundeswehr was formed, it chose to simply continue using the MG42 as its standard GPMG. This was initially done by converting older MG42s to 7.62x51mm NATO as the MG1 (adopted in 1958), but progressed to production of a brand new version of the gun by Rheinmetall (adopted in 1968). The M...

Beretta in Italy developed the BM-59 after World War Two as an improvement on the M1 Garand - lightened, shortened, and given a box magazine, bipod, and selector switch. And the did this in a whole lot less time that the US took to finalize the M14. So how does the BM-59 handle? Well, sorry Sprin...

The first handguns issued by the North West Mounted Police (which would later become the modern RCMP) were 330 Adams revolvers, requisitioned by the new police service in March 1874, and shipped over from England. Upon their receipt in July of that year, the Mounties were dismayed to find thoroug...

Developed by the Soviet Union primarily as an antiaircraft weapon (and used to good effect in that role through World War Two), the DShK heavy machine gun was modernized almost immediately upon adoption. The first batch of new DShKM guns entered production in February of 1945. The final pattern w...

The most well-known historic automatic revolver is the British Webley-Fosbery, but there were other handguns of the type that were put into production. One example is the Union auto-revolver, made in Toledo, Ohio shortly before the First World War. While the Webley-Fosbery was intended to be a hi...

The final iteration of the Danish Schouboe pistol is this, the model 1916. Produced in prototype quantities only, it took the features of the 1910 pattern (safety and external barrel pivot) and made a few more changes. The slide no longer telescopes over the barrel - possibly to add mass and red...

The USAS-12 is one of the few fully-automatic shotgun to actually be put into mass production, aside from Russian 12ga AK conversions. It was designed in the late 1980s based on the work of Max Atchisson and manufactured by the Daewoo conglomerate in South Korea. About 30,000 were made in all, mo...

Designed by brothers Charles and Sebre Howard and first patented in 1862, this is a single shot lever action produced by the Whitneyville Armory between 1866 and 1870. It is a really neat compact design that is all contained within a tube. The system was made in rifle, sporting rifle, and shotgun...

In the course of researching Chinese domestic pistols of the Warlord Era, I sorted through several hundred examples, and was able to identify six distinct patterns of uniquely Chinese designs. Once of these I have designated the Horn Grip Type, as almost all the examples identified use horn (some...

One of the most popular pistols in Warlord Era China was the FN 1900, a compact and reliable officer's pistol in .32 ACP. The Chinese also found great use for the Mauser C96, but this was seen as a sort of combat carbine, where the FN was more a defensive weapon and status symbol.

Several lar...

The armies of Warlord Era China had quite a fondness for the FN 1900 pistol, but they also made extensive use of the 7.63mm Mauser cartridge. So what would be a more natural choice than to make copies of the FN 1900 in 7.63mm Mauser? We can look past the fast that the FN design (and its Chinese c...

The Czech ZK-383 is a magnificent submachine gun, but sadly very scarce in the United States. So when I saw the semiauto example, I wanted to take it out to the range for some plinking. It has some magazine issues (as one might expect form a one-off semiauto made by a hobbyist here in the US), bu...