One of the original design intentions of the SA80 project was to replace the infantry rifle and the submachine gun with a single weapon that could fulfill both roles - hence the choice of a bullpup configuration. This would, theoretically, allow rifle ballistics and also SMG handling and maneuver...

The Salvator-Dormus has the distinction of being the world’s first semiauto pistol, being patented in 1891. It is chambered for the 8mm Dormus cartridge, and holds 5 rounds in a Mannlicher type clip. Only about 50 of these pistol were made, mostly for an Austrian military trial in 1896/7 (this pa...

Savage was very successful with their .32 ACP and .380 ACP pocket pistols, and in the 1910s was interested in also breaking into the .25 ACP market, to compete with the Colt 1908 "Baby Browning". Savage invested in all the tooling to make a new blowback .25, but never put them into serial product...

Andreas Schwarzlose was a German designer who created several very interesting and unusual handgun designs (in addition to his 1907 heavy machine gun, which was adopted as a standard arm of the Austro-Hungarian military). His first handgun was the model 1898, a short recoil, rotating bolt pistol ...

The Model 1941 Sosso is a huge Italian experimental semiauto pistol designed by Giulio Sosso. It uses a short recoil locking mechanism and is chambered for standard 9x19mm Parabellum ammunition, but its more unusual feature is its magazine. Instead of using a traditional spring and follower, the ...

The origins of flap-locking (as used in the G41(W), G43, DShK, DP, and RPD, among others) goes back to a Swedish Lieutenant Friberg in 1870, who patented the system. At that time, however, the fouling endemic to black powder made self-loading firearms effectively impossible and so the concept wou...

This is a very rare Ross automatic pistol, patented in 1903 by Charles Ross, of the Ross Rifle Company in Quebec. It is a short recoil, toggle locked design, made for the .45 Ross proprietary cartridge (although efforts were made, unsuccessfully, to make a .45 ACP version for the US 1907 pistol t...

One of the most mechanically unusual rifles I have had the chance to examine is the SIG AK-53. One of a long line of interested experimental self-loading designs made by SIG between the 1920s and 1950s, the AK53 is a gas operated rifle with a fixed breechblock and a barrel that cycles forward whe...

The Grande Puissance - High Power - was John Browning's last firearms design. In fact, he only began the design; it was taken to completion by his protege Dieudonné Saive at FN in Belgium. It was the best military handgun of the time, with a double-stack 13-round magazine capacity, and chambered ...

The South African company Smith and Beecham was not a large operation, and their most notable product was a .380 caliber compact pistol, of which not more than 2000 were ever made (it was not a success). Experimentally, the company also developed a polymer frame for the Browning High Power, howev...

Canada was the first country to adopt the FAL rifle, purchasing trials rifles from FN within weeks of the formal standardization of the 7.62mm NATO cartridge. Canada acquired production rights to the rifle along with the technical package form FN, and spent 18 months converting the drawings into ...

Designed in an effort to compete with the then-new Colt/Browning air cooled 1895 machine gun, the Extra-Light Maxim weighted in at just 27 (maybe 28) pounds for the gun, and 44 pounds with tripod. This may sound heavy, but it was a remarkable improvement over the 100+ pounds of most models of Max...

The m/44 pistol was intended to be a lower-cost replacement for the Lahti L35 pistol for the Finnish Defense Forces, but production delays resulted in the first batch of 25 examples not being completed until after the end of the Continuation War. Treaties limited Finland's right to conduct arms d...

When John Browning licensed his handgun patents, the North American rights were granted to Colt, and the Western European rights to FN in Belgium. Browning provided the patents and patent model guns to the companies, and they were then free to interpret the design however they thought best. In th...

The H&K Mk 23 pistol was developed in the 1990s for the US Special Operations Command and US Navy. The goal was to produce an "offensive handgun" that could serve as a primary armament for a special forces operator as well as a backup arm. It was required to be no more than 12 inches long, fit a ...

Among the large family of roller-delayed rifles produced by Heckler & Koch, one of the rarest and least known is the HK32. This was the select-fire shoulder rifle chambered in 7.62x39mm. These rifles appeared in H&K sales literature for a time, but were only made in very small numbers for one or ...

George Lanchester was the engineer responsible for originally reverse engineering the German MP28 submachine gun for production by the British, under the designation Lanchester. Once he finished that design work, the gun was put into production by the Sterling Engineering Company, and Lanchester ...

Mauser had been at the forefront of military self-loading pistol design with its C96 pistol, but by the 1930s it had lost major market share to Sauer and Walther in police and commercial guns. The Mauser 1910/1914/1934 line of compact pistols was getting a bit old, and the Sauer 38H and Walther P...

Today we are looking at one of the rarest and earliest rifles built by Paul and Wilhelm Mauser, a design which would set in motion all the events that led to the Mauser company becoming one of the great world leaders in small arms. The Mauser brothers were born in Oberndorf am Necker in the Kingd...

Hiram Maxim was the first person to create a truly practical and functional machine gun, based on a patent he filed in 1883. He pioneered the recoil operating system - the concept of harnessing the recoil generated by a firearm to perform the actions of reloading that firearm. His patent was base...

The MP40/I was an experimental modification of the MP-40 submachine gun developed by the Erma company (we think) in late 1942. It was presumably developed in response to complaints of Soviet fire superiority with SMGs because of their large drum magazines (and also the larger number of SMGs used ...

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 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 ...

When the Belgian military decided to adopt a new rifle in the late 1880s, they attached a wide variety of competitors. The best of the batch were Mauser and Mannlicher, with Mauser ultimately winning - but among the other entrants was Belgian Captain Uldarique Marga and his bolt action rifle desi...