Available from Chipotle Publishing:
https://chipotlepublishing.com/product/the-worlds-assault-rifles/

I am often asked about what books someone interested in firearms should get. That's a really hard question to answer because most good books have a pretty narrow focus, but there are a few that ...

John Browning’s first machine gun design was a gas operated system that used a swinging lever instead of a linear piston. He presented the first prototype to Colt in 1890, and it went into production in 1895. The US Navy bought a couple hundred, but the Army opted not to adopt it (much to Colt’s ...

The Soviet Union decided to adopt a 50mm light mortar in 1937 as a company-level armament. The first such weapon they used was the RM-38, introduced in 1938. It was a complex design, with a gas venting system to adjust range (200m - 800m), a bipod specifically set to either 45 or 75 degrees, and ...

EDIT: Please note that apparently the Priestel book I used as a major source for this video is partially incorrect, in that Pauly did create a traditional percussion system in France. The fire piston / diesel system was done slightly later after he moved to England, perhaps to avoid the Forsyth p...

SilencerCo announced the Maxim-9 pistol in late 2015. Having gone through some huge growth of the past few years, the company wanted to expand its capabilities and thought that the time was right for a modern integrally suppressed pistol. It was a unique new design of modern semiautomatic pistol ...

One of the classic "pick one" debates of World War Two is the German MP-40 versus the Soviet PPSh-41. During the war, both sides often opined that the other's SMG was better, so which really was? The MP-40 is more compact, with a smaller magazine but also a lower rate of fire. The PPSh is larger,...

In early 1944, the Office of Strategic Services purchase 1,000 specialized pocketknives made by Schrade. Instead of regular blades and tools, these were lock picking knives, with one small blade, three different picks, and two rakes. Able to easily pass as a normal pocketknife on casual inspectio...

The story of the Tec-9 begins with a Swedish company called Interdynamic AB and their designer Göran Lars Magnus Kjellgren designing a cheap and simple submachine gun for military use. It found no interested clients, and so the company decided to market it in the United States as a semiautomatic ...

The British military decided to organize their disparate small units of riflemen into a single standardized group in 1800. The 95th Regiment - the British Rifle Corps - was founded and it was equipped with a pattern of rifle designed by one Ezekiel Baker. This was a .625 caliber rifle with a 30” ...

This is a custom rifle made by gunsmith P.E. Hall of Ashtabula, Ohio most likely between 1948 and 1854. It has a cluster of four .36 caliber rifles barrels (24 inches long) in an octagonal frame. The action is a quadruple set of mule ear hammers, two on each side, with a double set trigger. Prett...

Colt SMG: First of the 9mm ARs

With the expansion of SWAT teams throughout law enforcement in the 1980s, Colt realized that it was leaving a lot of sales on the table by not having a submachine gun it could offer alongside M16/CAR-15 rifles and carbines. They addressed this in the early 1980s by...

The Nielsen Device is a type of suppressor mount that allows a suppressor to move forward upon firing and thus allow a recoil-operated firearms to cycle reliably despite the added weight of a suppressor. Popularized by Doug Olsen in the 1980s, they allow pistols to be readily suppressed without n...

The Human Engineering Lab's HEL-E4A was the most commonly used suppressor used in the Vietnam War. It was the result of a series of suppressor designs from the Aberdeen Proving Grounds HEL which were developed to balance suppression and back pressure, so that they could operate reliably on a stan...

Penguin Brutality patch and t-shirt available from Varusteleka:
https://www.varusteleka.com/en/product/forgotten-weapons-penguin-brutality-t-shirt/81986

The problem of the P320 has evolved past the actual mechanical issue with the pistol - which still hasn't actually bee identified. The problem ...

My book "Pistols of the Warlords" is available through Headstamp Publishing:
https://www.headstamppublishing.com/chinese-pistols

Today I am very happy to welcome Jason Clower as our Q&A guest. Jason runs the channel "Type 56: The Story of China's Army" (https://www.youtube.com/@Type56_Ordnance_D...

Adorable Penguin Brutality shirt available from Varusteleka:
https://www.varusteleka.com/en/product/forgotten-weapons-penguin-brutality-t-shirt/81986?option=81709

I'm sure you've heard the one about how targeting an enemy soldier with a .50 BMG is a war crime, but targeting his belt buckle is ok...

How can you have a 12ga with a 14" barrel but not have it be an NFA-regulated Short Barreled Shotgun? And how can you have a .410 shotgun-firing pistol that isn't an NFA-regulated Any Other Weapon?

The KK-Mpi-69 (Klein Kaliber Maschinenpistole 1969) was a .22 rimfire training model of the standard East German stamped AKM. It used a simple blowback replacement bolt assembly and proprietary front trunnion along with a standard AKM receiver and fire control group. There is no gas block, since ...

I had a chance to visit the Arex factory in Slovenia recently, and they had a custom-made full-auto Arex Delta pistol. Well, who wouldn't want to give that a try? A whole bunch of us had a shoot-off with it...which I sadly did not win.

This lecture was presented at the Spring 2025 meeting of the American Society of Arms Collectors. It was given by Alex MacKenzie, Curator of the Springfield Armory National Historic Site.

If you had to pick one, would you take a G1 (FAL) or a G3 (H&K)? Both are 7.62mm NATO rifles adopted by Germany. The G1 has more features and capabilities, like the carry handle, bipod, multiple muzzle devices, and adjustable gas system. The G3, on the other hand, is simpler, without things to ch...

As Sweden was looking to adopt a new self-loading infantry rifle in the 1950s, one of the contenders was a modernized version of the Ljungman. The Fm/57 is one of the last iterations of that project. It is chambered for 6.5x55mm but uses the short-stroke gas piston conversion that we previously s...

The G150 is a rifle specifically assembled by and for the Swiss P-26 organization: a very secretive stay-behind group intended to fight foreign occupiers of Switzerland. It was one of a series of such organizations that began with a concern during World War Two the Germany might invade, and conti...

The ZK-381 was designed by Josef Koucký, his first design of 1938 (hence 381). This is one of the last of the Czech pre-war self-loading rifle projects, of which there were quite a lot. It uses a tilting bolt and a short-stroke gas piston, with ZB26 machine gun magazines and chambered for 7.92mm ...