More Q&A! No specific theme this time, but a combination of SHOT Show news, what-ifs, and some specific questions about me…

0:00:34 - SHOT Show Report
0:05:22 - 1895 Lee Navy destructive testing
0:07:40 - Opinion on the L85A2
0:09:25 - How did NATO adopt the 5.56x45mm?
0:11:32 - Cold War s...

Today I would like to introduce you to Jack, who runs the Cartridge_Gram account on Instagram. Ammunition researchers and collectors are a somewhat rare subset of gun collectors, and theirs is a subject that is often overlooked. Jack is posting some pretty cool stuff, and I look forward to seeing...

Arsenals of History is an annual symposium of firearms museum, and met this year at the newly renovated Cody Firearms Museum. The theme of this year's symposium was social media and museums. This presentation was given by Danny Michael, Assistant Curator for he Cody Firearms Museum. Video games t...

Arsenals of History is an annual symposium of firearms museum, and met this year at the newly renovated Cody Firearms Museum. The theme of this year's symposium was social media and museums. This presentation was given by Logan Metesh of High Caliber History on the topic of museum staff and visit...

Arsenals of History is an annual symposium of firearms museum, and met this year at the newly renovated Cody Firearms Museum. The theme of this year's symposium was social media and museums. This presentation was given by Scott Gausen, an Education Specialist for the Springfield Armory National H...

Whether it is described as a machine pistol, a submachine gun, or a personal defense weapon, the PM63 Rak is really not the best examples of this sort of thing to actually shoot. The open-bolt/slide mechanism is very cool from an engineering and design perspective, but does in fact have a tendenc...

The PM-63 Rak is a pretty interesting Polish Cold War machine pistol or personal defense weapon. It fires from an open bolt, but uses a slide like a pistol rather than a bolt in an enclosed receiver like a typical SMG. There are several other interesting elements to the design, so let's take a cl...

I'm happy to be joined once again by Russian small arms historian Max Popenker, for a discussion of the development of the Kalashnikov PK machine gun. This is universally regarded as one of the best general-purpose machine guns ever designed. We will look at the Soviet machine gun systems at the ...

Note: I goofed on a detail here; "DRGM" is a trademark designation, not something related to the party. Sorry!

Today, courtesy of Tom from Legacy Collectibles, we are taking a look at "party leader" PPK pistols. There are three different versions of these, and we will look at all of them in se...

The 1985 competition to pick a new sniper rifle for the British military came down to a closely fought contest between the Accuracy International PM and the Parker Hale M85. The M85 was a fantastically accurate rifle, every bit the equal of the AI submission and to this day there are still people...

The Pretoria Arms Factory was founded in 1954 by Piet Nagel and Jan Willem Dekker. both Dutch immigrants to South Africa after WW2. They began manufacturing a simplified copy of the Baby Browning pocket pistol, chambered for the .25 ACP (6.35mm Browning) cartridge. This appears to be the first d...

The P7 was one of the most interesting and original handgun designs of the last few decades. Originally created for West German police trials, it was chambered in 9x19mm. As it became popular beyond Germany, the question arose of it being offered in additional calibers. The P7M10 was released in ...

The US held three series of pistol trials beginning in the late 1970s to find a replacement for the venerable M1911 handgun. H&K was a participant in all three - in the first the entered a P9 and a VP-70, both of which were rejected. In the second series, they entered the P7A10 - a single-stack P...

The One submachine gun is one of the ugliest SMGs ever designed, and yet also one of the most beloved by its users. The original basis for the gun was a .22 rimfire submachine gun designed by 23-year-old Australian Evelyn Owen. That prototype was found by his neighbor Vincent Wardell after Owen ...

This Vickers, Sons & Maxim 37mm MkIII "Pompom" is on display at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. The MkIII pattern is quite scarce, with less than one hundred ever made. It is built around the 37 x 124mm cartridge, firing a 1.25 pound explosive or armor piercing projectile. This one (or one of ...

Today I have made the trek to the C&Rsenal studio to have a Q&A with Othais. Not familiar with his channel? It is a wonderfully in-depth look at firearms history, development, and use focusing on the weapons of World War One.

When talking about antitank rifles, I often hear people ask why such things were not fitted with telescopic sights and used as snipers' rifles. So today, I figured I'd take a few minutes to explain the various reasons why...starting with why Carlos Hathcock's scoped M2 Browning was not the same t...

When the Israeli Defense Forces tested the FN Minimi, they found it to be lacking in a few areas, and decided that they could develop a better SAW domestically. Developed in the 1980s, the result was the Negev. Like the Minimi, the Negev is a 5.56mm light machine gun that can feed from either bel...

In the brief couple of years between the election of a new black-majority government in South Africa in 1994 and the dissolution of the Musgrave company, it attempted to produce a new 9mm pistol to sell to the burgeoning market of black South African citizens buying handguns. Ownership of pistols...

The MP5 is widely considered the best submachine gun ever made, for its reliability, its handling, and it's closed-bolt delayed-blowback action. It is so widely praised, in fact, that H&K's efforts to replace it with less expensive polymer submachine guns have largely failed, as their customer si...

The MP-35 is one of several very nicely made inter-war German submachine guns. Unlike most, it has the magazine mounted on the right, and ejects out the left - a configuration chosen to standardize the manual of arms with the K98k style bolt handle. The MP-35 is also unusual in having a progressi...

In 1994, Smith & Wesson began shipping the Model 3566, a double-stack, single action pistols tuned for high-level USPSA competition. It was a pistol that was going to dominate the new Limited division, with the capacity of a standard 9x19mm handgun but enough power to qualify for Major. And then ...

Tom Denall’s “Silent Destroyer” (originally built on surplus Sanish “Destroyer” carbines) is a Ruger 77/44 bolt action rifle with a large integral suppressor. Chambered for the .44 Magnum cartridge, it allows the use of a heavy bullet to maximize ballistic potential while remaining subsonic, prev...

The Hotchkiss was the primary heavy machine gun for the French and American forces in World War One, and this 1918-production example was just begging to be given a workout. So we took it out to the range to run a few strips of ammunition through it. Compared to my previous shooting experience wi...