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...

While Rollin White’s patent for the bored-through cylinder was a massively important element in the development of Smith & Wesson as a company, White’s actual firearms design was impractical and never produced. In fact, there is only one firearm that actually bears his name - the solid frame .22...

Introduced by the Italian Pietta company in the 1970s (yes, the same Pietta that makes all those reproduction Old West revolvers and lever action rifles), the PPS/50 has been a continuously popular firearm for more than 40 years now. Designed to roughly resemble a Soviet PPSh-41 submachine gun, t...

Looking for a light and compact weapon to equip its new Airborne units, the US military adopted the M1A1 Carbine in May of 1942. This was mechanically identical to the existing M1 Carbine but with a wire-frame side folding stock in place of the standard wooden stock. This allowed the M1A1 to fit ...

In Lethal Weapon IV, Jet Li's character is caught at gunpoint by Mel Gibson's character...until he turns the tables by stripping the slide right off Gibson's Beretta 92FS. I wonder how feasible that really is? Also, I wonder if perhaps Jet Li's character was not the first to do it...?

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...