Early in the Vietnam War, the US Navy acquired a quantity of Swedish M/45B submachine guns (“Swedish K”) for special forces use. By 1966, however, the Swedish government would no longer authorize sales of arms to the United States because of involvement in the Vietnam War. So instead, the US turn...

Before they became obsolete, antitank rifles were a way to bring substantial firepower to small infantry teams - but they were never light weight. As with some of the early water cooled heavy machine guns, designers looked for ways to make the weapons more easily transported, and the solution arr...

I have long been told that the Smith & Wesson Model 76 is a very nice submachine gun to shoot, despite its rather crude appearance. Some complain about a very heavy trigger pull, but this gun does not have that problem. Well, in my opinion the stories I have been told are true - the 76 is an almo...

Today we are out shooting the H&R M14 "Guerrilla Gun" prototype, but fitted with a standard M14 stock and barrel. With these parts, it handles and fires exactly like a standard M14 - so I can answer the most pertinent question:

Is the M14 really so uncontrollable in full auto?

The Schwarzlose 07/12 was made through the wolf of World War One as the standard heavy machine gun of the Austro-Hungarian armed forces, and many of them remained after the war ended. With the breakup of the Austro-hungarian Empire, these guns were dispersed to a variety of nations, among them Ro...

The German military first encountered American Bazookas in Tunisia in 1943, and quickly put in place a program to copy and improve on the design. At that point, the latest German antitank weapons was the Raketenwerfer 43 “Puppchen”, which was a locked-breech rocket launcher built on a carriage li...

The story of the USS Niagara is quite an odd little corner of history. It was a ship built in 1877 and acquired by the US Navy in 1898, fitted out as a water distillery and supply ship. That fitting out was not actually done by the Navy, though, but rather by a group of wealth private citizens in...

While the US Army was satisfied with the Thompson as a fighting weapon in World War Two, it was most certainly not happy with the gun's exorbitant price tag. The Thompson was a very expensive gun, and the Army wanted to see that change. In March of 1942, engineers at the Savage factory submitted ...

Before he made a big success with the M10 (MAC-10) submachine gun, Gordon Ingram designed a couple other guns. His initial M5 submachine gun and M20 light machine gun never went past prototype stage, but the M6 did prove to be successful, at least in a limited way. The M6 was a very simple blowba...

While Harrington & Richardson was making M14 rifles for the United States military, they were also experimenting with other variations on the design. Among these was the “Guerrilla Gun”, an shortened and lightened M14. The barrel was reduced in length by 4.5 inches and also reduced significantly ...

The hype? Yeah, it's real. The FG42 is the nicest full-auto full-power rifle I have yet fired. This is a recut of a previous video that YouTube decided to squash.

Captain Patrick Ferguson was a British officer who designed and patented a breechloading rifle in 1776, which would actually see service in the American Revolution at the Battle of Brandywine. Ferguson presented two rifles to the British military for consideration, one of them being this specific...

In 1918 the United States began manufacturing tanks for the war effort in Europe, and these tanks naturally required armament. The British were mostly using the Hotchkiss Portative for they new tanks and the French were using the Hotchkiss 1914 heavy machine gun. The initial American weapon of ch...

The first light machine gun adopted by the United States was the M1909 Benet-Mercie, made by the Hotchkiss company in France. The gun was adopted when the US military realized that machine gun doctrine reuqired different guns for the light and heavy roles, and the M1904 Maxim gun was only suitabl...

The Colt Model 639 was the export version of the Colt Model 629, which was type classified by the US military as the XM177E2 and issued to MACVSOG special operations units in 1967 and 1968. Improved from the Model 609 carbine, the 629/639 has an 11.5 inch barrel and an interesting small muzzle de...

Signal flares were an important communications tool for aircraft during World War Two, and a multitude of flare pistol types exist with mounting brackets for aerial use. The introduction of pressurized fuselages made this a much more difficult proposition, however. These two flare pistols were de...

By 1939, Auto-Ordnance was thoroughly bankrupt, having about $400 in assets and a debt of more than $1.2 million to the estate of the late Thomas Ryan, it's original financier. Ryan had died in 1929, but the company shareholders had prevented his estate from forcing the sale of the company for a ...

The USMC had acquired a few hundred early 1921 model Thompson submachine guns in 1926, and prompted the US Navy to formally test the guns. The Navy requested a reduction in the rate of fire, in order to improve controllability and reduce ammunition consumption (20 round magazines go quickly at 90...

The Order of St John - the Knights of Malta - began as an order to protect Christian pilgrims on the road to Jerusalem, but transformed into an organization dedicated to corsairing in the Mediterranean Sea. Basically, legally justified pirates. For about 300 years they were based on the island of...

Military Historical Tours is a company specializing in guided tours of battlefields and war memorials, for the historical enthusiast and veteran alike. I spent about 10 days with them visiting WW1 American battlefields in France this spring, and had an excellent time - their offerings are a great...

I have been getting a lot of comments asking when there will be a shooting video with my MAS-38 submachine gun. If has cleared the NFA transfer process, so it's not actually in my possession. So, the next hurdle is finding ammunition. The 7.65 French Long cartridge it uses has been out of product...

The Mamba was originally conceived in a 1970s Salisbury, Rhodesia barroom bull session about the best elements of semiauto pistols. The project would wind up being pushed by an American expat named Joe Hale, and production of parts was contracted out to a South African engineering firm.

The Ma...

During World War Two, the Grand Harbor in Malta was the most-bombed place in the world, under aerial bombardment for two full years because of its position as a central Mediterranean base for British air and sea forces. While these attacks were focused on the harbor facilities, most of the island...

The largest muzzleloading black powder cannons ever built were the Armstrong 100-ton guns which saw service with the Italian Navy and with British coastal fortifications on Malta and Gibraltar. They were purchased by the Italians first, to outfit a pair of new super battleships, each vessel havin...