The MP 3008, aka Gerät Neumünster, was one of two German efforts to copy the British Sten gun. The first was the Gerät Potsdam ("gerät" meaning device or project; basically project code name), which was a direct copy of the Sten distinguishable only by a marking details and a few differences in m...

The Villar Perosa is one of the first small machine guns developed and used by a military force. It was designed in Italy and introduced in 1915 as an aircraft weapon, to be used in a flexible mount by an airplane's observer. The gun consists of two independent firing actions mounted together. Ea...

The K-50M was a North Vietnamese modification of the PPSh-41 submachine gun to mimic the handling of a French MAT-49. Made from Chinese Type 50 guns (which were direct copies of the original PPSh-41) in small shops, the K-50M used a wholly new lower receiver assembly. This new lower fitted an AK ...

The T2 submachine gun was Auto-Ordnance's entry into the ongoing competition to replace the classic Thompson submachine gun with something more economical to produce. It was a closed-bolt, select-fire design using a progressive trigger and a tubular receiver, along with stand Thompson gun magazin...

George Hyde was a gun designer who is due substantial credit, but whose name is rarely heard, because he did not end up with his name on an iconic firearm. Hyde was a German immigrant to the United States in 1927 who formed the Hyde Arms Company and started designing submachine guns. His first wa...

Yesterday we looked at the short-lived Bernardelli VB submachine gun made a few years after World War 2, and compared it to the post-war Beretta Model 4 SMG. Having seen how different the two guns really are, it's time to take them to the shooting range and see how they compare in actual firing...

The Bernardelli company, known mostly for sporting arms, made an effort to break into the law enforcement/military/security market in the year after World War Two. This Model UB submachine gun was manufactured in 1948 and 1949, with a total of about 500 made. While it looks like a copy of the Ber...

Developed by CETME in the 1960s, the C2 (aka CB64) submachine gun was clearly inspired by the Sterling, but includes several clever mechanical safeties. The charging handle is non-reciprocating and integrates a bolt lock which it automatically deactivated when the charging handle is used. This al...

This cut-down Beretta Model 38/44 submachine gun was made by the EOKA (Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston) independence group, which fought in the late 1950s for Cyprus to be reunified with Greece, instead of being a British colony. It shows a clever use of a Bren gun barrel handle as a front gr...

Introduced in 1957, Franchi's LF-57 submachine gun has a very distinctive sci-fi look to it, but was never able to become a major player in the Cold War arms market. It is in all ways a fully satisfactory design, including a grip safety, bolt lock to prevent accidental discharge, reasonably stabl...

The Owen Gun is one of the really good submachine guns fielded during the Second World War, but is a very scarce gun to find today. I had a chance to briefly shoot one year ago, and when I had the opportunity to try one out at Morphy's, I jumped at it. Feeding from the top and ejecting out the bo...

When the US military released a request for what would become the M1 Carbine in 1940, the Auto-Ordnance Corporation offered up a Thompson submachine gun simply rechambered for the new .30 Carbine cartridge. This entailed a new magazine, a receiver modified for the longer magazine, and a new barre...

The UD-42 was originally the design of Carl "Gus" Swebilius, who was at the time (1940) working for the High Standard company. It failed to attract interest form the US military, but was appealing to the Dutch government for arming their East Indies colonies. A contract for 15,000 guns was signed...

When the Swedish military decided that 1937 seemed like a pretty good time to be getting some new submachine guns, they arranged to purchase a version of the m/31 Suomi from their Finnish neighbors - which they called the M-37. Since the standard Swedish military pistol (the Husqvarna m/07) was c...

When World War Two began, Australia saw little threat of invasion from Germany (obviously), and sent a substantial number of firearms to Britain to help arm the Home Guard there, which was seriously concerned about the possibility of a German invasion. When Japan and Australia declared war in Dec...

The story of the Austen submachine gun did not end when the Mk I guns were pulled from combat service in 1944. The manufacturer continued to work on an improved version, which would be ready in 1946, after the end of World War Two. Only 200 were made total, and they were both adopted and declared...

The Model 57 is a select-fire carbine made by Beretta around the .30 Carbine cartridge. It uses a newly designed magazine much more durable that the American M1/M2 Carbine magazines, and has a tilting bolt locking system coupled with a gas tappet style of piston. Many of the features are distinct...

Andries Piek was a farmer in South Africa in the late 1970s when he mail ordered an LDP 9mm carbine from Rhodesia. The gun was impounded by South African customs, and Piek wound up designing modifications to the gun to meet South African laws. He was contracted to do this to all the LDPs sent to ...

The Australian Owen submachine gun was once of the best overall SMG designs of the Second World War, and when Australia decided to replace them in the 1960s, the new F1 design have big shoes to fill. The basic configuration of the top-mounted magazine remained, but coupled with elements of the St...

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 ...

At the end of World War Two, the Paris Police decided that they needed a few different features on a police submachine gun than the then-standard MAS 38 offered. A few hundred were converted to the new police requirements, interestingly mirroring the characteristics that would be used a few years...

After the adoption of the MAT 49 as the standard French military submachine gun, elements of the French security services also adopted it to replace the 7.65mm MAS 38 submachine guns. These included the Paris Police, who developed a special variation of the MAT 49 for their use, designated the MA...

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 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...