This is an example of a craft-made pistol captured in Vietnam and brought back to the US. While many Vietnamese fighters were supplied with good-quality weapons from other nations (primarily Chinese-made AK and SKS rifles), weapons are virtually never in sufficient supply for guerrilla-type force...

With the advent of successful self-loading pistols, one of the additional markets that many companies tried to appeal to was the compact carbine. Self-loading rifles in proper rifle cartridges would not be developed as quickly as the pistols because their much greater chamber pressures represente...

The Colt 1907 was one of the significant developmental iterations of the design that would eventually be adopted as the Model 1911 by the US military. This pistol began as John Browning’s Model 1900 in .38 caliber, with the .45ACP cartridge being first created for the Model 1905 iteration. That 1...

The Astra 900 was a pistol developed to take advantage of a large Chinese demand for semiauto pistols with shoulder stocks, following on the massive sales of the Mauser C96 "Broomhandle" in that country. In the 1920s and 30s, civil war in China drove a huge market in arms, but international treat...

When the German military finally could no longer tolerate the expense of the P.08 Luger in the late 1930s, they held a trial of possible replacements. The three main entrants were BSW with a gas-operated pistol, Walther with what would ultimately be accepted as the P.38, and Mauser with it's expe...

Many people are aware of the .45 caliber Lugers made for US military field trials - but far fewer people realize that Lugers were both tested by the US military and sold commercially several years prior to the .45 tests.

In 1900, the US military put several hundred 7.65mm Luger pistols into fi...

Many unique and interesting pistols were made in China in the 1920s and 1930s, and this pistol is a good example of them. It is not a copy of any specific Western handgun, although mechanically it works like a Mauser 1914 pocket pistol. It is chambered for .32ACP (the other common caliber for the...

Colt .380 Prototype Pistol

The Colt model 1903 pocket hammer is based of of the 1902 sporting model, which is in turn a civilian market variant of the Colt 1900. Like it's immediate forerunners it is a .38acp chambering, of course not to be confused with the later .38 Super, more on that later. It's a locked breech design ...

The All-American 2000 was Colt's attempt to break into the polymer high-cap pistol market in the early 1990s, when Glock was dominating that field. Colt took what appears to have been a pretty good pistol designed by Eugene Stoner and Reed Knight and made some pretty terrible decisions when adapt...

In 1897, John Browning patented four different types of automatic pistol - a blowback type that would become the FN/Browning 1900, a gas-operated type similar in concept to his 1895 machine gun, a rotating-barrel type, and a swinging-barrel type. It is this swinging barrel design that would have ...

This is a factory prototype of the Colt's entry into the Offensive Handgun Weapon System as requested by US SOCOM in the early 1990s. It featured a rotating barrel locking system, double action trigger system (with manual safety and decocker), and single stack 10-round magazine. Only about 30 wer...

Colt-Jolidon Prototype Pistol

Here I present the developmental history of the 1911.

Days at the range don't always go as planned.

After over a year of looking, I finally managed to recently find a box of 7.65mm Frommer (Short) ammo that I could use to test-fire my Frommer 1910. Huzzah! It sure is tiny little stuff...and I was able to get is for a great price because the selle...

I've been meaning to put this video together for a while, and finally have it - a detailed look at the mechanics and internal workings of the Frommer 1910. This was the third major iteration of Rudolf Frommer's long-recoil locked-breech pistol design, and the most successful up to it's time (alth...

The Gyrojet was the closest thing to a commercially successful rocket pistol, although not many were sold before the company went out of business. This is the 13mm pistol version (the most common type of Gyrojet), and fires a 180 grain rocket projectile.

This very odd one-off pistol first appeared in a 1958 Golden State Arms catalog, with no description of its history or mechanical design. I have often seen it referred to as an automatic revolver, but this is a misconception - what appears to be a cylinder is actually a rotary magazine, akin to a...

The official issue sidearm for the Iraqi Army (and many of its police agencies) is the Tariq, a domestically-manufactured copy of the Beretta M1951 pistol. The Beretta is a pretty decent pistol, mechanically fine and comfortable to shoot but hampered by an awkwardly-placed magazine release and sa...

As the Second World War started to really take a toll on German industrial production, several companies started to work on alternatives to the P38 handgun in an effort to reduce production cost and time. This is one such example made by Walther, with a normal type of milled slide and an experime...

This prototype 1895 Krnka automatic pistol, serial number 7, was the first in the developmental line that led to the 1907 Roth-Steyr cavalry pistol.

The Model 1904 was basically the first working automatic pistol made by Webley (there was a 1903 toolroom experiment, but it didn't really work). Like all the Webley automatic that would follow, it was designed by William Whiting. The 1904 was the company's first effort at making a semiautomatic ...

Margolin .22 Target Pistols

This prototype Webley was one of just under 1,000 Model 1910 pistols produced by the company in an effort to get some military and police interest in their .38/9mm automatics. It was tested by a number of organizations (including, notably, the London Metropolitan Police) but not adopted by any. T...