The Pancor Jackhammer was a select-fire combat shotgun designed by John Anderson in the 1980s. He was a Korean War veteran who had used a pump shotgun in combat, and while he liked the shotgun concept, he felt there must be a more efficient way to make a shotgun than a single-loading pump action....

The Winchester 1897 was the gun that really set the standard for the now-ubiquitous pump action shotgun. It was designed by John Browning, but was not the first pump action designed and sold. That credit goes to Christopher Spencer, who put the first pump action on the market in 1882. His patent ...

US M3 37mm Anti-Tank Gun (including slow motion!)

Starr revolvers are one of the less recognized designs used in the US Civil War, although tens of thousands of them were made and issued. Indeed, in many ways they were superior to the much more common Colt and Remington revolvers of the period. One of the interesting facts about the Starr is tha...

Right at the beginning of the 20th century, there were 3 options on the market for semiauto commercial sporting rifles in the US: the Remington Model 8, the Winchester 1905/1907 Self-Loader, and the Standard Arms Model G. The Remington and Winchester were both good guns, and sold well - the Stand...

John Browning's Auto-5 long recoil shotgun was the first mass-produced semiauto shotgun, and would eventually become the second best-selling semiauto shotgun in the world (not bad for the first one to hit the market). It was patented in 1900 and initially manufactured by FN in Belgium, with Remin...

The Steyr M1912, or Steyr Hahn (meaning "hammer", to distinguish it from the striker-fired Steyr 1907) has a number of features that make it unusual among pistols today. It uses a fixed internal magazine fed via stripper clips, and a short recoil, rotating barrel locking system. Only a handful of...

The M1878 was the last new rifle produced by the Sharps company before it went out of business in 1881. It was the invention of none other than German gun designer Hugo Borchardt, better known for his C93 Borchardt automatic pistol (generally considered the first commercially successful automatic...

During the Chinese civil war in the 1920s and 30s, international arms embargoes made rifles difficult to acquire - which led to a lot of popularity for pistols with shoulder stocks. The C96 "broomhandle" Mauser in particular was popular, and it was copied by a number of Spanish firms for sale in ...

The Vickers machine gun was an evolution of the Maxim, the world's first successful machine gun. The Vickers was adopted by the British armed forces shortly before World War I and remained in active service until 1968. It is renowned as one of the most durable and reliable machine guns ever made,...

Sylvester Roper was a great example of the classic American inventor - he had a wide range of interests, and affected technological development in more than one industry. This shotgun is a design he patented in 1866, which uses a 4-round magazine of the 12ga shells. It has an unusual mechanism wh...

The ZH-29 was the brainchild of noted Czech arms designer Emmanuel Holek in the late 1920s. It was one of the earliest practical and reliable semiauto rifles available, although Holek and the Brno factory were unable to secure any large orders for it (the three known orders total about 500 rifles...

Before he adapted it to .45 caliber for US Army pistol trials, Jens Schouboe was building his pistol design in .32 ACP (7.65mm Browning). It was a blowback action, hammer fired, and very quick and easy to field strip. The gun was reliable and well made, but just didn't catch on in the market, and...

There isn't much I can say about this one, as I have no idea who made it or when. What I can tell is that it is a blowback action with a rather unique "rocking block" type of bolt and what appears to be a clock style coiled flat spring for the hammer.

Colonel Jean Alexandre LeMat was a native Frenchman who emigrated to the United States and in 1856 secured a patent for a "grapeshot revolver", which had both a 9-shot .42 caliber cylinder and a 20-gauge smoothbore barrel acting as the cylinder axis. A moveable striking surface on the hammer allo...

John Pedersen was one of the more prolific and successful gun designers in American history, having even been described by John Moses Browning as "the greatest gun designer in the world". And yet, many people only know about Pedersen from his unsuccessful toggle-locked rifle or his WWI Pedersen D...

In the years after WWII, several countries experimented with general-use optical sights on service rifles. The Germans had pioneered the concept with the ZF-41 long eye relief optic during the war (and the ZF-4, to some extent), and the British actually adopted the EM-2 with a permanently-mounted...

Until the middle of the 20th century, the most powerful automatic pistol made was Sir Hugh Gabbett-Fairfax's Mars pistol. With the .45 caliber version approaching the energy of a .45 Winchester Magnum, it was quite the accomplishment for a gun designed initially in 1898! Well, RIA has a very earl...

Not all companies responded in the same way to the development of cartridge revolvers and the Rollin White patent. Allen & Wheelock, for example, decided to simply ignore the patent and make revolvers for their proprietary lipfire cartridges (fairly similar to rimfire) while relying on their lawy...

After he failed to win US military adoption of his toggle-locked rifle design, John Pedersen went looking for other countries that might be interested in the gun. One of these was Japan, which experimented with toggle-locked Pedersen rifles and carbines for several years in the early/mid 1930s. T...

The most common Japanese pistols used during World War II were the Type 14 and Type 94 Nambu designs, by a huge margin. However, there were a number of other handguns used in small numbers, and today we're looking at two of those. The first is the Sugiura, essentially a copy of the Colt 1903 made...

Gustloff was a large industrial concern in Germany which made many different weapons for the military. In addition to these, its attempted to market a small-caliber pistol for police or SS use. This pistol used an alloy frame (with steel inserts for durability in crucial areas) and steel slide, w...

During the 1920s and 1930s, a combination of civil wars and international arms embargoes led to a lot of domestic firearms production in China. The size and quality of manufacturing facilities varied widely - everything from massive factories established with European technical assistance to one-...

Andrew Burgess was an extremely prolific gun designer who gets very little recognition today. One of has particularly interesting weapons was a pump-action, folding shotgun. Because Spencer already had a patent on the use of the forearm as the pump, Burgess designed his gun to use a sliding sleev...