A lot of people see the constantly-increasing price of collectible firearms, and assume that guns must be a pretty good investment. Well, they really aren't. The stock market outperforms collectible firearms with ease. But if you want to buy guns with an eye to increasing prices, there are a few ...

Today we are continuing to trace the development of the IM Metal / HS Produkt VHS rifles. During this period, Croatia briefly considered adopting the Israeli Tavor rifle. Part of the adoption would have included a license for domestic production, and HS Produkt would have been the company to do t...

After their abortive effort at designing a bullpup AK conversion, IM Metal (later to become HS Produkt) decided to make another try at developing a rifle for the Croatian Army. This time, they decided to base their design on the FAMAS. Why that rifle? Well, at the time the Croatian Homeland War w...

The HS Produkt company, best known for making the XD pistols sold in the US by Springfield, was originally called IM Metal, and was a general fabrication company in Croatia. When the Croatian Homeland War began, there was a clear need for domestic small arms production, and the two engineers at I...

Behold my amazing predictive powers! This is why I usually try to stick to describing the past...

The HS-95 was developed by HS Produkt to replace the PHP pistols. With the experience of producing many thousands of PHPs, the company had a much better understanding of how to design a pistol for production, which is immediately obvious in the HS95. It is a traditional tilting-barrel Browning ac...

The Hovea m/49 was adopted by Denmark, but was originally designed by Huqvarna for Swedish military trials. The first 10 prototype were made in 1944 and competed against the Carl Gustav Stads design - which ultimately won and was adopted by Sweden as the m/45. Both designs were very similar; simp...

In the late 1970s, H&K partnered with Hensoldt to create the ZP/AP (Ziel/Aiming; Projektor/Projector) and then ZPP/APP (Ziel/Aiming; Punkt/Point; Projektor/Projector). This was essentially a calibrated flashlight with an aiming point and pressure switch. It projected a beam of light that was spec...

It's time for the annual Halloween PCC/shotgun match! By popular demand, I went as Futurama's Lee Lemon this year, with the Angstadt Arms MDP-9 PCC. Since the last time I was shooting it, I've gotten a replacement bolt hold-open to hopefully fix the failures to lock open, and a Wilson Combat "Tac...

Correction: The SRT used the Sako AII action, an updated L579 (not the L357) action.

George Kellgren is the brains behind KelTec and all their unorthodox designs. But before he formed KelTec, he created Grendel Inc, where he began his long career in the firearms industry. The first gun that Gr...

The Browning High Power story begins with a French 1921 request for a new military pistol. FN engineer Dieudonné Saive developed a double stack, single feed magazine and John Browning adapted a Browning 1903 pistol to use it, and this was sent to France for consideration. This pistol worked well ...

So, I took the GR-1 to this month’s Backup Gun Match…but all did not go as I’d hoped. We blew a fuse in the gun (it is still an alpha prototype, remember), and were not able to get it repaired in time to complete the match. We did get it fixed, and some of the other folks around had a chance to t...

After encountering Italian Villar Perosa machine pistols in the field, Austro-Hungarian troops requested a similar weapon. The project was given to FÉG to work on, and the result was the Pistolen-MG Model 1917: a pair of Frommer Stop pistols with long barrels and 25-round magazines, redesigned to...

During 1944, the US and UK cooperatively ran a major effort to drop arms and equipment to French Resistance forces in preparation for the Allied landings in France. It began as Operation Carpetbagger with night drops from B24 Liberators in January 1944, and escalated into the summer. Eventually a...

Designed and manufactured by Fabbrica Nazionale d'Armi di Brescia (National Arms Factory of Brescia) in northern Italy, for use by the RSI and German military forces (as well as some partisan units). They were produced in 1943 and 1944, and only about 1,000 were made (all with serial numbers in t...

The FN MAG (Mitrailleuse d’Appui Général – General Purpose Machine Gun) was designed by Ernest Vervier, who took over from Dieudonné Saive as FN’s lead military arms designer in 1954. The Swedish government approached FN about building a belt-fed version of the BAR, which they had been unsuccessf...

Fabrique Nationale was formed as a consortium of small gunmakers to produce Mauser rifles for the Belgian Army, and when that work was complete the company basically had nothing else to do...until they met John Browning. Browning had a new pistols design and needed a manufacturer - and FN happene...

One of the significant foreign rifles in Finnish service during the Winter War and Continuation War was the Swedish M96 Mauser. These rifles began arriving in Finland even before Finland's independence, and in 1919 the Civil Guard was given ownership of 1,390 of them. The numbers increased slowly...

Finland used a variety of FN pistols prior to WW2, and had already evaluated the High Power when Russian invaded and the Winter War began. With an urgent need for more arms, Finland ordered a batch of High Power pistols, which FN was happy to include with the other arms orders already being deliv...

I have been reading about the Winter War in past few months as part of my work on a book about Finnish small arms, and I have been really struck by the similarity in images of that fighting and the current war in Ukraine. I'd like to take a few minutes today to talk about the similarities - and d...

This really neat compact PDW prototype was developed by Ladislav Findorak in the 1990s for a Czech military program, although nothing was adopted as a result. The lever-delayed system allows it to have a much lighter bolt and carrier than a typical blowback action, while also remaining very compa...

The EMG-01B is a small portable rail gun made by Arcflash Labs. Introduced in 2017, it can throw magnetic dowel pins approximately 1/4" x 3/4" (6mm x 19mm) at about 150 fps (45m/s). It does this with a series of 8 capacitors and electromagnetic coils, and holds 18 projectiles in its magazines. Ge...

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When I decided that I wanted to try out hunting as a way to source my own meat and enjoy the outdoors in a new way, I really didn't know where to start. I didn't have any family who hunted when I was growing up, and I don't live in an area where hunting is a common...

ATF's Curio & Relic list, which includes a list of guns removed from regulation by the NFA (through 2018):
https://www.atf.gov/file/128116/download

ATF Stabilizing Brace worksheet:
https://www.atf.gov/file/154866/download