George Hyde was a gun designer who is due substantial credit, but whose name is rarely heard, because he did not end up with his name on an iconic firearm. Hyde was a German immigrant to the United States in 1927 who formed the Hyde Arms Company and started designing submachine guns. His first wa...

The M3 (and its followup improved M3A1 model) was the United States' answer to the high cost and manufacturing complexity of the Thompson submachine gun. The M3 "Grease Gun" (because really, that is what it looks like) was a very inexpensive weapon with a stamped and welded receiver and only a fe...

When Winchester first began producing Model 1895 rifles, they made a model that only lasted a short time. Between serial numbers 5000 and 6000, the first pattern 95s were replaced by a second pattern of the design, which changed several elements. The most notable was the receiver profile, which w...

Cook and Brother was one of the largest and most successful of the private ordnance factories in the South during the Civil War. It was formed by two British brothers who had moved to New Orleans, Frederick and Francis Cook. They opened a rifle factory at the intersection of Common and Canal stre...

The R75A was the last version of Colt’s commercial BAR, with 832 made between August and December of 1942 for the Netherlands Purchasing Commission. It was a derivative of the commercial R75 BAR, with a pistol grip, magazine well cover, and ejection port cover. The R75A added on a folding bipod a...

Want to play He-Man shooting a BAR from the shoulder? This one has been built for just that purpose. It’s chambered in 7x57mm for reduced recoil, has a 21” barrel to improve handling, a custom lengthened pistol grip, safe-semi-full trigger group, good early M1918 pattern sights, and Bren Gun trip...

The Porter Turret Rifle was patented in 1851 by Perry W. Porter, and is a vertical turret design - meaning that it has a revolving cylinder in which the chambers are aligned pointing outward radially from the center axis (instead of all being parallel to the center axis as in a traditional revolv...

The Republican factions in the Spanish Civil War had much more trouble obtaining arms than the Nationalist elements, and this led to several attempts to build pistols in small-scale workshops. The best known of these are the RE and Ascaso copies of the Astra 400, but in the city of Barcelona a gr...

The Inkunzi PAW (Personal Assault Weapon) is a 20mm shoulder fired semiautomatic grenade launcher designed by Tony Neophytou (and previously known as the Neopup). It is a creative and very interesting weapon system, both from a mechanical perspective and also from a question of practical applicat...

How Does it Work: Open Bolt vs Closed Bolt Firearms

Most semiauto firearms fire from a closed bolt and most fully automatic firearms fire from an open bolt, but these are far from strict rules, and many exception exist. Open bolt offers better cooling and prevents any possibility of cookoff, w...

How Does it Work: Blowback Action

The simplest for of firearms action is blowback, also called simple blowback. It is basically just an application of Newton's 3rd Law; that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. As the bullet moves forward down the barrel, the slide or bolt...

Thanks to my friends at Bear Arms in Scottsdale, we have an H&K P8A1 to take a look at today - the current Bundeswehr issue version of the USP. Chambered for 9x19mm and adopted in 1994, only a few things differentiate the P8/P8A1 from the standard commercial USP. Most notably is the safety, which...

The H&K G41 was developed for the NATO trials of the early 1980s, which were set up to look at both rifles and cartridges for NATO standardization (although they did not end up choosing a rifle). The gun is a basically an HK33 roller-delayed system set up to use standard M16 magazines and with a ...

I have gotten quite a lot of questions about this experimental Austrian 1915 machine gun or submachine gun since it was included in the Battlefield One computer game. Unfortunately, the sum total of information we have on this weapon is three photographs found in an Austrian archive. Extrapolatin...

The Halbek Device was a clamp-on muzzle brake designed by two Rhodesians, Douglas Hall and Marthinus Bekker. It was patented in Rhodesia in 1977 and in the US in 1980, and manufactured in small numbers for the Rhodesian military. I have seen these occasionally, and doubt they are actually very ef...

Today I am speaking with Ken Hackathorn about submachine guns - specifically the Thompson and the MP5. Mr Hackathorn has an extensive resume that he is quite humble about, but I will point out that it includes being a US Army Special Forces Small Arms Instructor. He has a great deal of practical ...

This video has been updated from its original form to fix translation issues and to clarify that Nepal was not, in fact, a British colony.

Originally published January 10, 2017.

Long a mysterious unknown member of the Martini family, the Nepalese Gahendra rifles finally became available in ...

When the G11 program was cancelled and German reunified, the West German military was still using the 7.62mm G3 rifle, while the East German forces had AK-74 variants. Neither of these were suitable for a new unified German NATO-member Bundeswehr - a rifle in 5.56mm NATO was needed. Heckler & Koc...

The Winchester G30R is the final iteration of David Marshall Williams' work on a full power .30 caliber military rifle. The project began with a design by Ed Browning (John Browning's half brother) using a tilting bolt an annular gas piston, manufactured for US military trials by Colt. It moved t...

I have been waiting for a long time to have a chance to make this video - the Heckler & Koch G11! Specifically, a G11K2, the final version approved for use by the West German Bundeswehr, before being cancelled for political and economic reasons.

The G11 was a combined effort by H&K and Dynamit...

After about 2 years or working and waiting, my FR-F1 has arrived from France - so it's time to get it zeroed! I am using the only commercial ammo available in the us; PPU 139gr FMJ (caliber 7.5x54mm). To properly show the accuracy this rifle is capable of, I will need to handload the ammo, and fi...

Patrick Hernandez is a noted collector of French rifles here in the US, and a moderator of several French firearm discussion channels - so when it comes to deciphering the markings on a French rifle he is an excellent person to ask. So today, we will go through each of the markings that is found ...

While on the road with Military Historical Tours visiting American battlefields of World War One, I was asked to explain the French mutinies of 1917. This was an extemporaneous lecture, so please forgive any factual errors I may have made (and such errors are entirely my fault, not that of MHT). ...

Today I am joined by my friend Edouard for a discussion of French gun laws, as part of our continuing series on how firearms laws vary across the world. The French system is...bureaucratic.