Today we are looking at a pair of Steyr 1893 trials revolvers. Only about 100 of these were made, primarily for Austro-Hungarian military trials. These two are early pattern examples, with Pieper-type gas seal systems in which the cylinder is cammed forward upon firing and an extra-long cartridge...

I have been curious to try shooting a Stechkin machine pistol for a while, and now thanks to Movie Armaments Group in Toronto, I have a chance to!

I hate to be a downer, but my takeaway from this experience is that the Stechkin is little more than a range toy, at least in fully automatic. With...

Sorry, slight mistake on my part - the arsenal mark on this is Molot, not Tula!

The APS is a machine pistol developed by Igor Stechkin in the late 1940s and adopted by the Soviet Union in 1951, basically at the same time as the Makarov pistol. The Stechkin and Makarov share many characteristic...

The Star Z-70B was an incremental improvement on the earlier Z-62 and Z-63 submachine guns adopted by the Spanish military and security services. It remains an open bolt, selective fire design, with an underfolding stock. The trigger has changed from a progressive type to a standard trigger with ...

This is a rather mysterious - or at least poorly documented - Mosin Nagant carbine variation. Made from an assortment of rifles dated from 1896 through 1920, these carbines were designed to fit Gulkevich folding bayonets. They have a barrel just slightly longer than a 1907 carbine, but were fitte...

William Soper of Reading, England designed this "Direct Action Breech Loader" and attempted to have it tested for British military adoption - but he was one day too late to have his rifle included in the tests and the Martini-Henry was ultimately adopted. The intent of Soper's system was to have ...

Today we are looking at two suppressed CZ-27 pistols, one Polish and one German. The Polish one was issued by the Ministry of Public Security, an agency which only existed from 1945 until 1954. It uses an aluminum suppressor with 5 baffles and 5 rubber wipes, threaded onto an extended barrel. It ...

The SIG 210, aka the P49, was a magnificent pistol, but really too expensive for a modern military sidearm. In the 1960s, the Swiss military began looking for a new service sidearm that would be a bit less costly, and SIG developed the 220 in response, which would ultimately be adopted as the P75...

In many countries, manually operated rifles are substantially easier for civilians to own than semiautomatic ones - and this was not lost on firearms manufacturers. In an effort to potentially open a new market, SIG experimented with manufacturing a pump action version of their very successful 55...

One of the classic mistakes make by authors who are not "gunnies" is to have a character threateningly click off the safety catch...on a revolver (sound effects editors do it in movies and TV, too). Argh! That's not a thing!

Except that, well, it sometimes is a thing. The Webley-Fosbery autom...

Is it "GUH-rand" or "GAIR-end"? Well, let's find out by asking John Cantius himself...

After looking at the history and mechanics of the VP-70 yesterday, we are heading out to the range to try it out (and thanks to Trijicon for generously offering use of their range!). I am curious to see just what that 2200 rpm rate of fire is like to shoot, and whether the awful trigger is as muc...

Some older footage from the vault - this was a gun I bid on, but did not win. Didn't want to have the whole audience thinking about bidding against me...but now that it's been sold there's no reason not to post the video.

The conversion of the Type 99 Nambu form 7.7x58mm Japanese to 7.62mm NAT...

We took a look at the history and mechanics of the G41 yesterday; now it's time to actually try it out on the range!

It, ah, did not go so well. But I did get to see a cool new malfunction I had never seen before! In fairness to HK, this was a demo gun that has been used and abused. On the ot...

The Cuirassier carbine is one of the very scarcest versions of the Berthier in the world, yet Patrick here is going to let me shoot a few rounds through his. My target is a steel plate at 300 meters, with a "feldgrau" silhouette - not visible through the camera, unfortunately.

Thanks, Patrick!

George Hyde designed the gun that would eventually be adopted as the M2 submachine gun in the late 1930s, and it was first tested at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in October of 1939. At that time, the gun had many good traits (weight, handlings, etc) but suffered from parts breakage and unreliability....

Basically nothing is known about this rifle in terms of who created it or when - but it is a pretty interesting example of an attempt to convert a bolt action rifle to semiautomatic. This rifle began life as a standard Dutch Mannlicher rifle. The conversion was done here be splicing a Lewis Gun g...

In order to allow cheaper and simpler training of troops, the South African Defense Forces adopted a .22 rimfire conversion kit for their R4 rifles. The system was developed by an engineer named Willie Klotz working for Thor Engineering. It is an open-bolt firing system which is quite complex, an...

Basic gun ownership in South Africa - what does it involve and how does it work? Dedicated collectors, sportsmen, and hunters? Self-dense and concealed carry? Well, when I was in South Africa I figured I'd get the scoop from a local..

The RP-46 was the final iteration of the Degtyarev DP27/DPM light machine gun, modified to feed from Maxim/SG43/PK belts instead of pan magazines. As such, it was able to serve the role of a universal machine gun like the MG34 and MG42 until the Soviet Union was able to develop a true purpose-bui...

Jean-Paul de Vries runs a very interesting private World War One museum in the village of Romagne-sous-Montfaucon in the Meuse region of northeastern France. It is the exact opposite of typical modern museums, as it has a massive number of artifacts on display with almost no printed explanation. ...

Rico is a gunsmith at SIG Neuhausen who likes to tinker. He put together this SIG 510 (aka Stgw 57), with a modern collapsing stock, quad rail foreend, Aimpoint red dot, heavy barrel, and massive muzzle brake. And we just happen to have some 7.5 Swiss and a full-auto grip assembly. How hard can i...

Paul Ribeyrolles was the manager of the Gladiator bicycle factory, and by 1918 he had significant experience in small arms design, having been a core member of the team that designed and built the 1915 CSRG Chauchat automatic rifle and the RSC-1917 semiautomatic rifle. These were forward-looking ...

The SITES Spectre was originally developed by the SITES company (Societa Italiana a Technologie Speciali SPA) of Torino to be the best police and counterterrorist submachine gun on the market. To this end, they studied the other guns on the market and what made a good SMG. The results were rolle...