The M1908 Mondragon is widely acknowledged to have been the first self-loading rifle adopted as a standard infantry arm by a national military force. There are a couple earlier designs used by military forces, but the Mondragon was the first really mass-produced example and deserves its place in ...

I didn't have the opportunity to do a full video with the folks who own this M18 Hellcat, but I did get some footage of it firing. Enjoy!

The first US military night vision system used in active combat was the T3 Carbine system - an infrared light-amplifying scope and IR floodlight mounted on an M1 Carbine. About 150 of these were used on Okinawa, and were quite effective. The system was refined over time, and by the Korean War thi...

Today we're looking at a pair of military survival rifles. One is a Luftwaffe M30 drilling - the most finely finished and luxurious survival rifle ever issued by a military force. The other is a US Air Force M6 survival gun - spartan and utilitarian - the polar opposite of the M30.

On this day 138 years ago, the combined forces of the Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho tribes delivered a staggering defeat to the US Army's 7th Cavalry under the command of General George Armstrong Custer. The battle was glorified in the East for largely political reasons in its immediate aftermath ...

Colonel LeMat is best known for his 9-shot muzzleloading .42 caliber revolver with its 20 gauge shot barrel acting as cylinder axis pin - several thousand of these revolvers were imported and used in the field by Confederate officers during the US Civil War (and modern reproductions are available...

The 1875 Lee Vertical Action was an experimental rifle designed by James Paris Lee (of Lee Enfield and Lee Navy fame) as an idea to increase the rate of fire from single-shot Army rifles. He touted an impressive 30 rounds in 45 seconds with the rifle, thanks to several design elements that combin...

Charles Lancaster was a master London gunsmith who made 2-barrel and 4-barrel pistols in a variety of British revolver cartridges (commonly known as Howdah pistols). Many of his pistols was purchased privately by British military officers, explorers, and big-game hunters to use as backup weapons ...

Taking a look at another artillery piece today, a 50mm mountain gun made for Siam (now Thailand) by the German Krupp company. It is a relatively simple (and thus relatively inexpensive at the time) design, with no recoil mechanism or adjustable traverse.

Today's item is a very cool piece - a German Sturmgewehr with a "krummlauf", or curved barrel attachment. This is the 30 degree type, intended (as goofy as this sounds) for firing around corners and over barricades in urban combat. A 90-degree version was also made for use in armored vehicles.

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.

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...

They Type 26 was an indigenous Japanese revolver introduced in 1893 (26th year of the Meiji era) to replace the Smith & Wesson No. 3 in Japanese military service. In many ways the Type 26 was akin to the other military revolvers of the day, like the Russian (and Belgian) Nagant, the French M1892,...

Thanks to the hospitality of the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, we had a chance to examine and disassemble a Type 11 light machine gun, chambered for 6.5mm Japanese. This is, of course, the very unusual hopper-fed design from Kijiro Nambu, which entered service in 1922. The action is largel...

Before standardizing on the Type 2 paratroop rifle (a 7.7mm Arisaka that broke in half at the chamber), the Japanese military tested a variant of the Type 38 carbine with a folding stock retrofitted into place. Very few of these were made.

The Type 92 was the final iteration of a machine gun that began as the Model 1897 Hotchkiss HMG made in France. The Japanese army purchased many of these guns, and then produced their own slightly refined version. These in turn were replaced by the updated Type 3 (1914) heavy machine gun, and fin...

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...

This is a recording of a workshop given at the 2014 AFTE (Association of Firearm and Toolmark Examiners) conference in Seattle, on the subject of proof marks and other identifying marks on firearms, specifically arms made between roughly 1880 and 1945.

I am available to present classes on this...

This is a recording of a workshop given at the 2014 AFTE (Association of Firearm and Toolmark Examiners) conference in Seattle, on the subject of magazines and clips as firearms feeding devices, including their history, development, function, and application.

I am available to present classes ...

Harmonica guns were a short-lived type of firearm that was developed in an effort to have reliable repeating weapons prior to the the modern centerfire cartridge. They were made in both muzzleloading and cartridge varieties, and one notable (and renowned) American maker of such guns was Jonathan ...

As the self-contained metallic cartridge because popular, a niche industry developed in converting percussion revolvers to use the new cartridges. One of the first of these conversions was designed by F. Alexander Thuer and marketed by the Colt company itself. Thuer's conversion was put into prod...

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 M1819 Hall rifle was the first breechloader adopted on a wide scale by a military force (the British Ferguson predated it, but was only made in small numbers). The Hall stayed in production on and off for several decades, being made in many configurations. This particular one is an 1836 patte...

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.