Charles Alsop patented the Alsop revolver design in 1861 and 1862, and produced it in two varieties - a .36 caliber Navy and a .31 caliber Pocket. The two were made in a single serial number range, with about 500 Navies and 300 Pockets. This Alsop Pocket is in excellent condition, and shops us a ...

One of the more interesting and unusual - and rare - variations of the M1903 Springfield is the version that was “Stripped for Air Service”. Contrary to common belief, these were not used as in-flight aircraft armament before the use of machine guns, or as antiaircraft armament for observation ba...

Although it was adopted by the Israeli military in the 1950s, the Uzi submachine gun did not generate much interest in the United States until the 1980s. The guns were used in limited numbers by the CIA covertly in Vietnam (and elsewhere), and also by various security elements of the US governmen...

Made by SSK Industries, the .950 JDJ is the largest sporting rifle made. The cartridge began as a 20mm Vulcan round, cut down to 70mm case length and necked up to 24mm (.95 caliber). It required a special sporting purposes exemption form the ATF to not be classified as a destructive device under ...

JD Jones’ .950 JDJ cartridge is a generally described as the largest sporting rifle cartridge ever produced, producing more energy than even the 4-bore cartridges that match it in bore diameter. Only three of these rifles were made, and the original loading was a 2600 grain (168g) cast bullet mov...

As usual, I have a recap today of the final prices of the guns I filmed form the most recent RIA auction (#71; September 2017). There were a bunch of machine guns in this one, although a variety of other things as well. I had gotten a lot of comments about the potential of my bidding on the Chate...

The deep beginnings of the Volcanic go back to Walter Hunt's Volitional Repeater, which became the Jennings repeating rifle, which then became the Smith-Jennings repeating rifle when Horace Smith was brought in to improve it. Smith was able to make it more commercially viable than the Jennings ha...

The TZ-45 is a late-war (some might say last ditch) Italian submachine gun made in small numbers and notable primarily for being the first SMG to use a grip safety on the magazine well. The grip safety on the TZ-45 is actually quite significant, as it locks the bolt in place when either cocked or...

There is very little documentation existing to explain the history of this rifle - all we really know is that per the receiver markings it is a Model 1936 Stendebach, and that it was brought back from Bavaria in 1945 by a US soldier who found it in a collection of confiscated firearms.

A numbe...

While the design for the Roper rifle and shotgun originally came from Sylvester Roper, Christopher Spencer played a very significant role in its production. When sales of the Spencer lever action rifle dissolved at the end of the Civil War, Spencer needed something new to work on, and Roper recru...

John W. Keene was an independent gun designer who developed this rifle (and took out 9 patents on its various features) in the 1870s. He did not have a factory at his disposal to produce the gun, so he went looking for manufacturing partners. The Remington company at that time had been heavily co...

The Reising Model 60 was the semiautomatic-only variant of the Reising Model 50 submachine gun. Offered side by side with the submachine guns, the Model 60 was also chambered for .45ACP and used the same magazines and a closed-bolt operating system that was identical except for the lack of a full...

In the late 1950s or early 1960s, Eugene Reising experimented with adapting the mechanism of his submachine guns to a locked-breech 7.62mm NATO military pattern rifle. The resulting rifle used an M14 gas piston and a bolt that was fully locked into the top of the receiver (instead of being a dela...

The PPS-43, designed by Alexei Sudayev based on a previous submachine gun design by I.K. Bezruchko-Vysotsky, was the Soviet replacement for the PPSh-41. The Shpagin submachine gun was a very effective combat weapon, but was time-consuming to produce and required specialized manufacturing tools. T...

Degtyarev’s PPD-40 was the first submachine gun adopted in a large scale by the Soviet Union. Its development began in 1929 with a locked breech gun modeled after Degtyarev’s DP light machine gun, but evolved into a much simpler blowback system. It was accepted as the best performing gun of 14 di...

When World War One began, the British did not have a formal sniping program, and by 1915 the British found themselves thoroughly outclassed by the Germans in this area. They responded by developing tactics and equipment for sniping, and by mid 1916 they had really outclassed the Germans. However,...

Most people think that the MP41 is simply an MP40 in a wooden stock, but this is actually not the case - and unlike the MP40, the MP41 can be accurately called a Schmeisser - because it was Hugo Schmeisser who designed it.

The MP41 is actually a combination of the upper assembly of an MP40 wi...

The MP35 submachine gun was designed by Theodore Emil Bergmann, the son of the Theodore Bergmann who had manufactured the turn of the century line of Bergmann pistols. Unlike his father, Emil was a firearms designer, and not just a manufacturer. This design was submitted for German military testi...

The MP28,II was Hugo Schmeisser’s improved take on the original World War One MP18,I design. It used a simple box magazine in place of the Luger drum magazines, and this magazine would form the basis for a long series of military SMG magazines. It was a double-stack, single feed design because Sc...

When Germany began looking in late 1915 for a new weapon ideally suited for the “last 200 meters” of a combat advance, Hugo Schmeisser’s blowback submachine gun would prove to be the weapon that would set the standard for virtually all submachine guns to come. It was a fully automatic only weapon...

The MG-17 is a belt-fed 8mm machine gun that was used on a large number of Luftwaffe aircraft early in World War II. The gun was developed by Rheinmetall through its subsidiary in Solothurn, Switzerland (as a way to evade the Versailles Treaty restrictions on arms development). The basic action i...

Developed in the early 1980s by Perry Arnett, the LAR Grizzly was manufactured from 1983 until 1998. It was an expensive gun (base price was $675 in 1985), a huge gun (48oz / 1.36kg), and a powerful gun - its .45 Winchester Magnum cartridge throws a 230 grain bullet at 1450 feet/sec (15g @ 450 m/...

The Lanchester MkI was the first British effort to produce a domestic submachine gun during World War II. The British military had rejected these types of arms as "gangster guns" prior to the war, and did not see them as useful in a military context. Well, that opinion changed rather quickly as t...

In 1917, the German military issued a contract for the construction of 2500 of these unique and impressive 4-barreled flare launchers. They were manufactured by 7 different companies (this example being from Gebrüder Rempt), and were intended for the illumination of airfields. To this end, they d...