At SHOT Show this year I took some time to speak with Mike Branson of Gideon Optics (formerly of Primary ands and Swampfox). Mike's a friend and a true optics nerd, and I figured he could help give folks an understanding of some of the fundamentals of modern firearms optics. Today, we are going ...

The Šokac was one of the more prolific Croatian domestic submachine guns of the Homeland War. This particular example is one that was specifically presented to the police chief of the town of Slavonsky Brod (the town where the guns were made). It is a mid-range production example, with the polyme...

The real-life Halo M90 shotgun I featured previously was actually built on a left-handed 870 Wingmaster. When I did the Christmas "historical" video about it, I didn't show the actual internal mechanics, and I figured some of you folks would be interested to see how the trigger was relayed from t...

When I posted some video of the real-life Halo M90 shotgun, one of the most common questions I got was, "why don't we have top-loading shotguns like that?" Well, it's an intriguing question...so let's see if we can find the answer.

Springfield Armory is now importing a version of the the VHS-2 bullpup (commercially named the Hellion here in the US) with a 20-inch barrel. This is the barrel length used in the most common military pattern of the rifle, the VHS-2D. In addition, Springfield's semiauto configuration has the prop...

Armi Jager was an Italian arms-making company that was created in the early 1950s by Armando Piscetta. He initially made .22 rimfire sporting rifles, then transitioned into making Old West style revolvers, and in the 1970s began offering a series of military lookalikes (he was also heavily involv...

Today we are out at the range with a 1943 Izhevsk M91/30 PU sniper rifle to see how it shoots...

Today I am at the range with one of DSA's mini-RPDs. The RPD is a nearly 80-year-old design (doesn't that make you feel old!) and a really good candidate for modernization. DSA made a whole bunch of improvements - new dual-spring recoil system, fluted barrel, solidly fitted handguard with a nice ...

One of the very few blockbuster American movies about the Eastern Front in World War Two is Enemy at the Gates, a film about the Soviet sniper Vasily Zaitsev. The movie is based around a duel between Zaitsev and the fictional German sniper Erwin König during the Battle of Stalingrad. There are lo...

The Mosin M91/30 PU is the most recognized Soviet sniper rifle of World War Two, but it was not their first. It was preceded by the Model 1931 PE, the Model 1936 PEM, and also the scoped version of the SVT-40 semiautomatic rifle. The SVT was intended to become a universal infantry rifle as well a...

While in Croatia for filming, we stopped in at the Homeland War Museum (Muzej Domovinskog Rata) in Karlovac. Built in the preserved ruins of the "Hotel California", it houses a small but pretty comprehensive collection of small arms form the Croatian Homeland War, in addition to many other artifa...

No blank-firing adapter? No money for practice ammo? What you need is a wooden clicky-clacky noisemaker that locks into your Suomi!

The Manda is a rifle that was designed for the Croatian Special Police at the beginning of the Homeland War in 1991. At that point, the Special Police (basically the SWAT teams) were basically the only really well-trained fighters in the country with combat experience. They wanted .50 BMG anti-ma...

The .300 Blackout cartridge and the rifle we now know as the Honey Badger were originally developed by AAC by request of a US special forces military unit. They wanted to replace their MP5SD submachine guns with a weapon that was still very quiet but had more terminal lethality than subsonic 9mm ...

Today we are going to take a look at the three main battle rifles of World War Two - the M1 Garand, the SVT-40, and the Gewehr 43. We will also consider the SVT-38, Gewehr 41(W), and Gewehr 41(M). The United States, Soviet Union, and Germany were the three countries that fielded large numbers of ...

The Chauchat is a machine gun with a reputation for being unreliable - a reputation that is only partially deserved. But what the Chauchat does completely deserve is its reputation for being notoriously difficult to shoot well. The grip design, stock design, sight placement, trigger, and the dyna...

Today we're taking a look at a Smith & Wesson Chief's Special, but not just any Chief's Special. This is serial number 29, factory engraved and gifted to Chief Edward Boyko of Passaic New Jersey in 1950. When S&W introduced the new revolver to compete with Colt's Detective Special, they simply ca...

The German military tested several designs of silencer for the MP40 submachine gun during late World War Two. Designated the L4x series, they were made by the Arado and Opel-Schneider companies. This example is an Arado L41, designed to use the sort of heavy rubber baffles as the Soviet Bramit pa...

On October 16, 1859 John Brown and 19 men left the Kennedy farmhouse and made their way a few miles south to the Harpers Ferry Arsenal. They planned to seize the Arsenal and use its arms - along with 200 Sharps 1853 carbines and 1,000 pikes they had previously purchased - to ignite and arm a slav...

Today I'm taking an SVT-40 to the monthly 2-Gun Action Challenge Match, and I'm joined by my friend Tom shooting an M1 Garand. We're both using moderately accurate gear, and so naturally I have a TT-33 Tokarev for my pistol and Tom has a 1911. So, let's see if I can hold my own with the Soviet gu...

The Red Army was interested in developing a semiautomatic rifle clear back to the mid 1920s, and they spent about 15 years running trials and development programs to find one. First in 1930 a Degtyarev design was adopted, followed by the Simonov AVS-36, and then Tokarev won out in 1938 with the S...

The vz.50 pistol was a compact .32 ACP (7.65mm Browning) double action pocket pistol used by police forces. It was given a face lift and redesigned the vz.70, and there were plans at one point to further modernize it. The new design would have been the vz.80, but only a few prototypes were made -...

When the P-83 pistol went into production, the Polish military decided that it wanted a dedicated suppressed version of the gun, and the result was the PT-83. Thw P-83 was a 9x18mm pistol with a fixed barrel, so attaching a suppressor was not going to cause any problems with functioning. However,...

When Smith & Wesson introduced their Model 3566 pistol for USPSA use, the company shooting team needed six of them for use at the 1994 USPSA Nationals. The Performance Center made these six guns, and they are magnificent examples of custom gunsmithing. This is the first of them, and designed for ...