During World War Two, the Canadian government set up a loan program to help Chinese companies provide all manner of material aid to Canada’s allies. Among many others, one recipient of this aid was the Nationalist Chinese government under Chiang Kai Shek. Chinese representatives asked the John In...

Luger collecting is one of the most detail-oriented and tricky niches in the whole firearms community - the amount of knowledge that has been documented is staggering, and the level of obsession with Lugers has led to lots of people chasing a small number of rare examples. And what do you get whe...

During and after the Korean War, the South Korean military was armed with American weapons - M1 Garands, M1 Carbines, M3/M3A1 Grease Guns, and so on. In the 1970s they wanted to modernize their equipment, and looked to the US. South Korea purchased M16A1 rifles form Colt, and the Daewoo conglomer...

The CZ vz.38 pistol was developed by the CZ factory as a replacement for Czechoslovakia’s vz.24 pistols. It was formally accepted by the Czech Army in June of 1938, and 41,000 were ordered from the factory. Tooling and production setup took close to a year, and the German military occupied the co...

The Carabinieros de Chile were formed in 1927 by combining the Rural Police, Fiscal Police, and Corps of Carabinieros into a single national police organization. We do not have an organization like this in the United States, but they are fairly common elsewhere in the world, acting as sort of a c...

Armalite was a company founded as an offshoot of the Fairchild Aircraft company, and working with aluminum was their specialty. This was a fairly novel material to the arms industry, and they were able to exploit it fantastically in the AR-10 and AR-15 rifles. The AR15 rights were sold to Colt in...

The Albanian SKS is the rarest of the major adoptees of the SKS rifle (Russia, China, Romania, Yugoslavia, Albania), and has a handful of interested details that differ from all other examples of the SKS rifle. The gun came about as the result of Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha’s pivot from Soviet ...

Everything was going great in Sweden until 1940, when they looked up and realized that on one side they were next to a bunch of Finns busy trying to fight off the Russians, and on the other side were a bunch of Norwegians not being quite so successful at fighting off the Germans. It was a dangero...

Designed by John Foote (of MAC/Cobray fame), the SSP-91 is a single shot rifle-caliber pistol intended for silhouette competition shooting and handgun hunting. It was introduced by Foote and Ordnance Technology of Stetson, Maine in 1986 as the SSP-86. He made some improvements to the design in 19...

After finishing his work on the PPSh-41 submachine gun, Georgiy Semyonovich Shpagin was tasked with creating a simplified flare or signal pistol for the Red Army. They had entered the war with a 1930 pattern type, which was quite nice, but more expensive than really necessary. Shpagin first creat...

The DWM order placed in 1899 had not provided Serbia with as many rifles as it had wanted, but it would take until 1906 for the Kingdom to arrange another loan to purchase additional arms. This would come from France, and it allowed Serbia to order 30,000 rifles, 10,000 carbines, and 50,000 barre...

Serbia in the 1890s was not a large or wealthy kingdom, and they had no domestic arms manufacturing capacity - but they did appreciate a good rifle and a good cartridge. The Serbian Army was armed with their M1880 rifle, which was a slightly improved Mauser 1871 single shot design, chambered a th...

The Republic Arms 401 was originally designed as a compact pistol for the South African Police. The country was under international arms embargo, and the police wanted to replace their assortment of Beretta 81s, PPS, and PPKs with something standardized, for use by detectives and female officers....

When Romania vocally objected to the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, it lost some of its opportunities for technology transfer form the Soviet Union. The USSR had adopted the SVD Dragunov in 1963, and it was looking like Romania would be putting that weapon into domestic production...

Peru acquired a large stock of Model 1891 Mausers from Argentina in 1901, and the carbine we are looking at today is a conversion from one of those long rifles - not a factory carbine. A few hundred of these conversions were done in the 1930s for the Peruvian Navy, and the result is a pretty inte...

With the development of the smokeless Gewehr 88 “Commission Rifle”, the German Army finally made a serious effort to bring their cavalry units up to a modern standard. There had never been a carbine variant of the Mauser 71/84 produced, and even by the late 1880s many German cavalrymen were still...

In the ongoing arms race between France and Germany, the Mauser 71/84 was the first German repeating rifle. Paul Mauser began work on it in the late 1870s, patented the design in 1881, and it was adopted formally in 1884. Production began in 1885, with a total of 1,161,148 rifles being delivered ...

Germany established their colony of German South West Africa (Deutsch-Südwestafrika, now Namibia) in 1884, as part of its late attempt to become a colonial power to rival the United Kingdom. The soldiers deployed to protect German interests t here were the Kaiserliche Schutztruppen, and they were...

The LAW-12 was a sister product to the much better-known SPAS-12 shotgun made by Franchi in the 1980s. The SPAS was a selectable pump or semiauto system, and the LAW was semiauto only. This made it simpler, less expensive, and about 2 full pounds lighter. It was intended for the law enforcement m...

John Henry Fitzgerald was not the first person to cut down a revolver barrel, nor the first person to bob the trigger guard or hammer. But he was the person who put all these modifications together as a package and popularized it as a self-defense piece. “Fitz” was a former NYPD police officer, v...

The Dominican Republic is one of the few Central and South American nations which did not buy Mauser rifles when they were the top of the line military armament available. Instead, the Dominicans waiting until the 1950s, and bought surplus long and short Mauser rifles from Brazil. Using their new...

Designed by Gerry Fox in the early 1970s, this carbine saw production sequentially as the Fox Carbine, the TAC-1, and the XF-7 Wasp, as it went through several different manufacturers. It is an open bolt, semiauto carbine sold in both 9mm Parabellum and .45 ACP - and you could get caliber convers...

Colt introduced the Delta Elite in 1987 to take advantage of the hype and publicity surrounding the 10mm Auto cartridge in the Bren Ten pistol. When the Bren Ten became such an ignominious failure, it left Colt in an excellent position as one of the first companies to actually have a viable offer...

Introduced in 1997, the CZ-97B is a .45ACP caliber addition to CZ’s line of globally popular handguns. However, the 97 has some substantial mechanical differences from the CZ-75 line. Most significantly, it locks on the front of the chamber and the ejection port instead of having locking lugs cut...