The DWM order placed in 1899 had not provided Serbia with as many rifles as it had wanted, but it would take until 1906 for the Kingdom to arrange another loan to purchase additional arms. This would come from France, and it allowed Serbia to order 30,000 rifles, 10,000 carbines, and 50,000 barre...

The Carabinieros de Chile were formed in 1927 by combining the Rural Police, Fiscal Police, and Corps of Carabinieros into a single national police organization. We do not have an organization like this in the United States, but they are fairly common elsewhere in the world, acting as sort of a c...

In 1954, the Unique company (MAPF) in Hendaye France rebuilt a batch of 800 Berthier carbines into .22LR caliber for use by the Sûreté Nationale (later renamed the Police Nationale). These were to be used for training and also issued to prison guards. Both 1892 and 1916 pattern carbines were used...

How did people determine chamber pressure in the years before computers and fancy electronics? Well, by squishing a calibrated slug of copper. Factories would convert rifles specifically for pressure testing use by adding a pressure ring around the chamber, drilling a hole in it, and then threadi...

In 1892, just a few years after the British military adopted the Lee-Metford rifle, the BSA and LSA factories began offering several configurations on the civilian/commercial market. They would produce them all the way into the 1930s, with your choice of Metford or Enfield rifling, and in Sportin...

Peru’s first standardized repeating rifle was the Model 1891 Mauser, as purchased in 1901 through Argentina. About 30,000 of these rifles were obtained when Argentina was unable to pay for them - although this may have been a quasi-diplomatic effort to hide Argentina’s interest in helping rearm P...

Enfield carbines are marvelous little guns, in my opinion, and just ooze history. This particular one is a Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) carbine, 10,000 of which were converted from obsolete British military Lee Enfield and Lee Metford carbines in 1903 and 1904. Where the British carbines had fu...

When the Danish Coastal Police was formed under German occupation to patrol the Danish shores, they needed rifles. Rather than use valuable military arms, the government turned to the noted sporting and target rifle manufacturer Schultz & Larsen to make a military version of the Model 36 target r...

One of the more mainstream attempts at incorporating electronic into firearms technology on the civilian market was the Remington EtronX, introduced in 2000. It consisted of a standard Remington 700 bolt action rifle, with the trigger and firing mechanisms replaced by electric versions. The firin...

The French Navy chose not to adopt the Gras rifle, and continued to use the paper-cartridge, needlefire Chassepot into the late 1870s. When they finally decided to adopt a new metallic-cartridge rifle, they decided to jump right to a repeater. Testing was done in 1877 of the Winchester-Hotchkiss,...

After the adoption of the single-shot Gras rifle in 1874, attitudes towards repeating rifles began to shift in the French military. The Battle of Plevna had shown that regardless of their hypothetic detriments, repeating rifles could substantially magnify a force's firepower and allow a smaller f...

This rifle, as best I can tell, is a prototype model made by Steyr in Switzerland in the early 1930s for use in Hungarian military trials. The Hungarians were looking to replace their old 1895 straight-pull Mannlicher rifles with something more modern. They wanted to keep their Mannlicher en bloc...

Everyone is aware of the Mosin Nagant rifle, but not everyone realizes that about 2 million of them were actually manufactured in the United States. Russia had been producing M91 Mosin Nagant rifles in their three major arsenals (Tula, Izhevsk, and Sestroyesk) since the mid 1890s, but when World ...

Why Lee-Enfields are fast, and other rifles are not. Featuring a customised Australian International Arms M10A in 7.62x39.

Keep the fanboy hate down to a dull roar please...

This unique custom sporting rifle (and shotgun) is a very cool example of the true gunsmith's art. This firearm began as a Mauser model 98 action, which was embellished and fitted with a fancy barrel (chambered for 8mm) and express sights. The gunsmith, Georg Knaak, of Berlin then added a shotgun...

Patented in 1879 by Reuben Chaffee and General James Reece, the Chaffee-Reece rifle is an excellent example of how an idea that seems good on paper can easily become untenable in a fielded rifle. The main design premise of the rifle was to have a tubular magazine in the buttstock which held the c...

I would like to propose that the M38 Carcano short rifle was, despite the poor reputation of the Carcano series of rifles, one of the best thought out bolt action weapons of World War 2. Why, you ask? Well, let's consider...

Only a few nations actually recognized the short ranges at which comb...

Once it became apparent that the MAS-36 was going to be used in a substantial amount of frontline combat (to the contrary of its intended role as a reserve or secondary rifle), it became important to provide it with grenade launching capability. The French military really liked rifle grenades as ...

There is a common assumption that the MAS-36 was a fool's errand from the outset - why would a country develop a brand new bolt action rifle in the mid 1930s, when obviously semiautomatic combat rifles were just on the cusp of widespread adoption? Well, the answer is a simple one - the French wer...

Today we are looking at a unique rifle in the National Firearms Centre collection - at first glance it appears to be an AK in a full-length rifle cartridge, using a Bren gun magazine. A closer look will show that it is actually a bolt action rifle, and a careful inspection just makes things stran...

The DeLisle carbine was a conversion of a standard SMLE rifle to the .45 ACP cartridge, feeding from modified 1911 pistol magazines. It was fitted with a 7" (175mm) barrel and a very large integral suppressor. The combination of the subsonic cartridge, the large suppressor volume, and even a soun...

In the mid 1930s, Turkey updated and overhauled the bolt action rifles in its inventory, to bring them all up to that same standard for sights, ammunition, sling configuration, etc. Most of the rifles overhauled were Mausers of various vintages, but some were other designs, like Gewehr 88s...and ...

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One of the single largest actions of the French Resistance during World War Two was Operation Montagnards - the plan to drop about 4,000 Allied paratroops onto the Vercors Massif when the resistance was activated in support of the...

Introduced by a Dutchman in 1897, the Wehrmannsgewehr was a type of 3-position shooting competition using military pattern rifles in a sporting caliber (the 8x46R, firing roughly a 150 grain lead bullet at 1800 fps). It was pretty limited in popularity in Germany until the end of World War One, w...