A while back I filmed some shooting with a Techno Arms MAG-7 shotgun in the US. It had been set up in the American non-NFA configuration, with a terrible wooden stock and long barrel, and I had not been able to find the appropriate mid-length shells for it. Well, on a trip to South Africa I had a...

Today we have Part 2 of machine gun terminology - the small caliber guns. Specifically, submachine guns, personal defense weapons, and machine pistols.

Submachine Gun: Pistol caliber, fully automatic, and fitted with a shoulder stock. For example, Thompson, MP40, MAS-38.

Machine pistol: Han...

Today I am testing out a new .30-06 Chauchat magazine converted from a Johnson M1941 machine gun magazine. The workmanship on this new mag is excellent, and much more extensive than I had initially realized would be necessary. This had the side effect of also making is a very expensive magazine t...

This M1918 Chauchat is still awaiting NFA transfer, but my dealer was able to bring it out to a public range where I could do some initial testing on it. I was expecting to get extraction problems as soon as it got warm, as that is what the literature suggests will happen. The .30-06 American Cha...

Everyone knows, of course, that the Chauchat is the worst gun ever, and can't normally get through an entire magazine without malfunctioning. Well, let's try that out...and with an even worse culprit; an M1918 Chauchat made for the AEF in .30-06.

After World War Two, Luxembourg was one of the nations which opted to purchase new FN-49 rifles. It bought a total of 6,203 of them for the military - an initial purchase of 4,000 semiauto SAFN rifles and a followup purchase of 2,000 AFN select-fire rifles and 203 semiauto rifles fitted with Belg...

Eugene Golubtsov, aka LugerMan, is manufacturing reproduction .45ACP caliber Luger pistols, based on the original blueprints of the 1907 pattern US Army trials guns. When he offered to send me one to try out, how could I say no?

I have had some rather unimpressive experiences trying to shoot s...

When Finland decided to replace the Luger as its service handgun, they turned to Finland's most famous arms designer, Aimo Lahti. After a few iterations, Lahti devised a short recoil semiautomatic pistol with a vertically traveling locking block, not too different from a Bergmann 1910 or Type 94 ...

The Spanish firm of Garate Anitua y Cia manufactured this copy of the Mannlicher 1901/1905 pistol for just a brief period around 1910. It is not a straight copy, as the Mannlicher was chambered for its own 7.63mm Mannlicher cartridge and fed using stripper clips and a fixed internal magazine whil...

The Kommando was a semiauto SMG-type carbine designed by Alex du Plessis in Salisbury Rhodesia in the late 1970s. It was manufactured by a company called Lacoste Engineering, and financed by a man named Hubert Ponter - and those initials were the name of the initial production version of the gun;...

This modern Hungarian submachine gun bears a remarkable similarity to the AKM rifle in many aspects, from the pistol grip to many of the manufacturing practices. In fact, the more we did into the gun, the more Kalashnikov influence we can see in it. This particular example is semiautomatic only, ...

As usual, I have a recap today of the final prices of the guns I filmed from the most recent Julia auction (spring of 2018). Once again, I focussed on machine guns, as well as high end sporting arms and Civil War rifles.

This was the last auction being held in Maine by James Julia, as the comp...

The Valmet M71 was introduced as a commercial export rifle in 1971, and was the first AK available on the commercial market in the United States and Europe. It was offered in both .223 and 7.62x39mm calibers, because the 7.62x39mm cartridge was rare and expensive at the time outside of Finland an...

The Israeli Uzi has become a truly iconic submachine gun through both its military use and its Hollywood stunts - but how effective is it really?

I found this fully automatic Uzi Model A to be actually rather better than I had expected. Despite the uncomfortable sharp metal stock, the rate of ...

The Stoner 63 was a remarkably advanced and clever modular firearm designed by Eugene Stoner (along with Bob Fremont and Jim Sullivan) after he left Armalite. The was tested by DARPA and the uS Marine Corps in 1963, and showed significant potential - enough that the US Navy SEALs adopted it and k...

During World War Two, the British spent several years developing a silenced version of the Sten gun for special operations commandos and for dropping to mainland European resistance units. This is a recreation of one of the experimental types, based on a MkII Sten with the receiver lengthened int...

This pistol is something of a mystery - its design comes from the experimental Mauser HsP of the mid 1970s. It uses a short recoil system with a pivoting locking block vaguely like a P38, and was an unsuccessful competitor to the H&K P7 in German police trials. The design was dropped by Mauser by...

The Nock Volley Gun was actually invented by an Englishman named James Wilson in 1789, and presented to the British military as a potential infantry weapons. This was declined as impractical, but the Royal Navy found the concept interesting for shipboard use. In 1790 the Navy ordered two prototyp...

When the United States entered World War One, its military has a relatively tiny handful of machine guns, and they were divided between four different types, as the military budget was small and machine guns were not given much priority. However, since the failure of his gas-operated 1895 machine...

Note that this is a rewelded action. It should be inspected by a professional before being fired (the firing footage in the video is a different example).

The M20 75mm Recoilless Rifle was developed starting in 1944 as a replacement for the 3.5” bazooka in an antitank role. It was developed an...

This Lorenzoni-pattern rifle was presented to King Louis XV of France in the mid 1700s, and is an exquisite example of firearms deemed suitable for royalty at the height of the European kings. It is .38 caliber and rifled, with remarkably usable sights and a repeating mechanism with the ball and ...

The first repeating rifle adopted by the British military was the Lee-Metford MkI, or as it was later redesigned, the Magazine Rifle MkI. This design combined the cock on closing action and detachable box magazine of James Paris Lee with the rounded-land Metford rifling pattern. Formally adopted ...

Unlike Great Britain and Germany, the French military never developed a formal sniper doctrine during World War One - they had no dedicated schools or instruction manuals for that specialty. The three major arsenals did produce scoped sniping rifles, however, with models of 1915, 1916, and 1917 (...

Charles Lancaster started his gunmaking business in London in 1826, and it would survive more than one hundred years, being run after Charles’ death by his sons and then by an apprentice who bought out the firm in 1878. The company had an excellent reputation for quality, and did some pioneering ...