Several patents were taken out on the BAR during World War One, but they were all kept unpublished and secret during the war. Just days after the Armistice, Colt patent attorney CJ Ehbets wrote to the US Patent Office requesting release of the secrecy restrictions. They responded just two days la...

The Thompson submachine gun struggled to find a market when it was originally produced, with the first batch of 15,000 Colt-made guns not finally all selling until the late 1930s. By that time, the clouds of war were gathering, and demand for submachine guns finally began to really grow. The US m...

One of the first new weapons adapted and used by the Chinese Peoples’ Liberation Army after the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war was the Type 50, a copy of the Soviet PPSh-41. The story of its manufacture begins at the Japanese occupied Mukden Arsenal. It was briefly occupied by the Sov...

During World War Two, Madsen (DISA) manufactured a licensed copy of the Finnish Suomi (see: https://youtu.be/hjs1uiAIpNQ). When the war ended, they wanted to replace this with a more modern, inexpensive design of their own. The result was the Model 1946 Madsen, a creative clamshell design of stam...

Today I took a Model 1883 Reichsrevolver out to the monthly BackUp Gun Match. This is an 1894-manufactured gun (made at the Erfurt Arsenal). It is a single action only, six-shot revolver chambered for the 10.6mm German Ordnance cartridge. The first type of Reichsrevolver was adopted by the young ...

Colt has released seven different revolvers named after snakes, and they have become a popular niche collection for many people. The Python is by far the best known, but several others are very rare. One of these is the Colt Viper, of which only a few thousand were made and only in 1977. The Vipe...

"Battle rifle" is not a formally recognized term like "assault rifle", but it is widely used, and I think it has a lot of utility. It is intended to differentiate between intermediate-caliber and full-power military rifles, and to that end I propose these four criteria to define a "battle rifle":...

The FAMAS was the best bullpup rifle of its era, but it was a difficult platform to modernize with optics. In 1995, the "FELIN" (Fantassin à Équipement et Liaisons INtégrés; Integrated Infantry Equipment and Communications) was commissioned to create a next-generation weapons platform for the Fre...

For my Passive Division run during the staff match portion of Moons Out Goons Out 2024, I used a borrowed prototype Boombox from Q, with an AGM Clarion thermal scope. The Boombox is essentially a Honey Badger scaled up to AR10 size, chambered for 8.6mm Blackout. With a 12" barrel and Porq Chop su...

Mitch, design engineer at Q, challenged me to a shootoff at Moons Out Goons Out 2024. If I win, I get a Boombox from Q. If he wins, I have to embarrass myself on the internet. Sounds like a risk worth taking!

The Boombox is essentially a Honey Badger scaled up to SR25 magwell size, chambered for...

For my Active Division run during the staff match portion of Moons Out Goons Out 2024, I set up a 9mm Hi-Point carbine with a BE Meyers MAWL last unit. Great laser; terrible gun. My hypothesis was that the gun itself didn't really matter so long as it was reliable and accurate enough to hit a sil...

Last weekend we ran Moons Out Goons Out 2024, a night rifle match presented by Tactical Night Vision Company at the Echo Valley Training Center. The match was a fantastic success, and I figured I'd give you some overview takeaways to the whole event before posting my complete stages runs later t...

At SHOT Show this year I took some time to speak with Mike Branson of Gideon Optics (formerly of Primary Arms and Swampfox). Mike's a friend and a true optics nerd, and I figured he could help give folks an understanding of some of the fundamentals of modern firearms optics. Today, we are talkin...

By the end of communism in Romania in 1989, the standard service pistols for the army and police were still the old Tokarevs and the Cugir Model 74 "Carpați" Walther PP copy. These were obviously outdated, and as it moved more towards the West, the Romanian military wanted a modern handgun. In 19...

Today I'm taking a brand new Ohio Ordnance M1918A3 semiauto BAR to the 2-gun match, along with a Tisas M1911A1 clone. The BAR is the WW2 configuration, but I followed the footsteps of many a US GI and took off the bipod (and it didn't come with a carry handle). That reduces the weight a bit from ...

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I'm very excited to announce my newest book: Small Arms of WWII - Soviet Union! This is the second volume in our Headstamp series of World War Two ar...

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About a year ago Larry Vickers and James Rupley published the first volume of a series on H&K firearms, beginning with handguns. After s...

Sorry for the poor audio - I was filming in an indoor range with a loud ventilation system running. But it was a chance to shoot a proper select-fire SIG-Manurhin 540, and I wasn't going to let that opportunity get away! It's a quite nice rifle, weighing in at 3.5kg / 7.75 pounds in 5.56mm. Frank...

The Model 74 "Carpați" is a copy of the Walther PP made by the Cugir factory in Romania. The project began at the direction of the Romanian secret police, who delivered a worn out Walther to the factory in 1972 with a request that they produce a domestic copy. Work on the design took two years be...

Among the many firearms designed and built in Croatia under the duress of the Homeland War was the MACS M2, a single-shot anti-material rifle chambered for .50 BMG. Designed by an engineer named Jankovic, these were in the field with Croatian units starting in 1994, and were used effectively in O...

During the 1930s, there was interest in Finland in replacing the Maxim heavy machine gun with something handier and more mobile. There were experiments with large drum magazines for the LS-26 light machine gun, but these were not satisfactory. Aimo Lahti began to work on a gas-operated GPMG, but ...

Romanian had more than a million rifles in its inventory after World War One, but they were mused between Mannlicher 88/90, Mannlicher 95, Mosin Nagant, and Berthier patterns - and they were almost all rifles and not carbines. In order to make practical use of all these arms, it was decided to al...

Today is my last chance to take the Halo M90 out for a fun day at the range...so why not make it the worst possible application for this sort of shotgun?

I came across this prototype (serial number 7) PDW/compact SMG in a collection, and had the opportunity to take it out to try on the range. I don't have any specific data about it, but it was made by Matra Manurhin, which only existed for 5 years, from 1985 until 1990. This was part of the repeat...