One of the shortcomings of H&K roller-delayed long guns has always been their triggers. As they come from the factory (with the exception of niche items like the PSG-1 trigger pack) they are long, heavy, and generally unpleasant. Good smiths can make them a bit better (I used a Bill Springfield t...

In my opinion, the SIG Romeo-M17 red dot is a really good piece of gear, but substantially overpriced. This is a red dot that SIG has developed specifically for the M17 and M18 military pistols, and is not compatible with any other platform. By using a proprietary mounting setup, SIG is able to m...

When Germany capitulated at the end of World War Two, several hundred thousand German soldiers were stuck in Norway (thanks to the efforts of the Norwegian Resistance preventing them from moving south to reinforce against Allied landings in Normandy). These solders' arms were surrendered to the N...

The revolver we are looking at today is a 9mm pinfire revolver adopted for the Papal Gendarmerie in 1868. At that time, the Papal States controlled roughly the same amount of territory as Switzerland today, and had its own armed forced for internal security - the Papal Gendarmerie. The Papal Stat...

At the beginning of Croatia's Homeland War, a severe need for small arms led to a whole plethora of simple submachine gun designs. Some were made in proper factories with professional tooling, and some were made by a couple blokes in a shed - and the Vila Velebita we are looking at today definite...

In the late 1940s the French developed a new suite of small arms, including a competition to replace the 7.65mm MAS-38 submachine gun with a new 9x19mm SMG. The eventual winner of this program was the MAT-49, which became an iconic part of French Army weaponry in Algeria and elsewhere. The St Eti...

When France was developing it's new suite of small arms in the late 1940s, there was a debate over whether to adopt an intermediate-power cartridge or retain the full-power 7.5x54mm round for the infantry rifle. Initially, a French 7.65x35mm cartridge was developed and used for several years of d...

In 1949, Israel was still fighting its war of independence, and purchasing arms internationally was difficult to do. The recently-formalized IDF wanted sniper rifles, and looked to Hammerli in Switzerland for a variant of the K-31 straight-pull bolt action action. Two different models were purcha...

Having served as the standard Soviet military sidearm for several decades, the PM Makarov was getting a bit obsolescent by the late 1980s. More of the world was using locked breech, 9x19mm service pistols but the Soviet Union still had essentially a domestic version of the Walther PP. To extend i...

Yesterday we looked at the history and the mechanics of the Vektor CP1, and today I'm taking it out to the monthly BackUp Gun Match. It isn't a pistol with a good reputation, but it's also not a pistol very many people gave a fair shake to. It has a decent grip, pretty decent sights, a fixed barr...

Thanks to Nathan Frisque for loaning us this very cool project to film - a very merry Christmas to him and to all of you watching! If you haven't caught on, this is a real-life recreation of the M90A CAWS shotgun from the Halo series of video games...

The best of the submachine guns made in Croatia during the Homeland War was the Ero, made by a company called Arma. The Ero is a basically perfect, parts-interchangeable copy of the Israeli Uzi that was developed in 1992 and adopted into Croatian Army service in 1993. The only really distinguisha...

Today we are looking at an overview of Soviet military service sidearms. This begins with the Model 1895 Nagant revolver, inherited from the Czarist Russian Army. The Nagant was adopted as the standard Red Army handgun, specifically in double action. Soviet refitting led to single-action Nagant r...

C&Rsenal posted a Top 10 Pistols of WWI video a few days ago, and I didn't entirely agree with their choices - so I figured I'd do my own list. I'm using the same base conditions that they did (only locked-breech pistols), and I'm judging the guns based on their desirability to a trained and prac...

The Vektor CP-1 was developed by Lyttleton Engineering Works (who owned the Vektor brand) in 1995 for a South African Police contract. They lost that contract to the Republic Arms RAP-401, but decided to put the CP-1 onto the civilian market instead. It was a pretty decent seller for them, and af...

Today we have a look at the EFA-2k Makarov holster that was "made for Spetznaz". I am extremely skeptical that any Spetznaz operator ever actually deployed with one of these things, though. It's a holster with a neat mechanical function; you can push the pistol down through the bottom of the hols...

The Makarov, designed by Nikolay Makarov, was the Soviet Union's new post-WW2 handgun. The whole Soviet small arms suite was changed in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the Makarov was intended to address a number of concerns with the TT33 Tokarev pistols. The Tokarev was a relatively challeng...

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Small Arms of WWII: United States of America is the first in Headstamp Publishing’s newest book series covering the myriad of weapons developed and fielded around the globe by t...

Today I've got on of Gorilla Ammo's GF-10 rifles to do some shooting with. It's an AR-10 platform chambered for 8.6mm Blackout (they also offer it in .243 Win, .260 Rem, 6.5CM, and .308 Win). It weighs in at just 7.2 pounds with a 16" barrel, so it's not an NFA item (they do also offer a 12" pist...

It's time for the monthly 2-Gun Action Challenge Match, and this time I'm bringing out the Madsen! I've rigged it up like the BOPE (Brazilian military police special teams) typically use them, with the flash hider and bipod removed to save weight. It's still a heck of a gun, weighing in at about ...

When the US adopted the Beretta Model 92 as the new M9 standard issue handgun in 1985, it was not without controversy. In particular, there was a scandal of cracked and broken M9 slides shortly after procurement began. The military did not budge on awarding the M9 contract to Beretta, but in 1987...

The Madsen LMG is generally considered an extremely complex and confusing system - but is it really? Today we are taking one apart to see just how it actually works. Because in fact, it's a very unusual system, but not really any more complicated than any other easy self-loading action.

During World War Two, the South African military used a lot of .303 caliber Bren guns. When 7.62mm NATO became the standard cartridge after the wa,r the Bren guns were put into storage, as converting them to the new rimless cartridge was a fairly complicated process. Instead, they purchased new F...

EDIT: Shoot, I managed to get the gear ratio backwards. Sorry! The recoil action provides the necessary delay, and then the gear ratio provides acceleration to ensure the bolt can open reliably, akin to the accelerator in a Browning M1917 or 1919 machine gun, or a Lahti L35 pistol. Please excuse ...