Finland and Sweden are both in the process of adopting AR-pattern rifles, and for the Finns this will be their first service rifle in 5.56mm NATO. It is a transition that has been anticipated for nearly 20 years, but was finally put into high gear by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Finland's ...

I figured that Finland would be a good subject for this month's Q&A, as I am visiting the country to shoot Finnish Brutality this month. In fact, this video was filmed during the trip (the match took place last weekend, and its video coverage will be coming soon!).

00:39 - Development of the Suo...

Savage launched its model 1907 pistol with a lot of marketing fanfare. It was "10 Shots Quick!" and promoted with testimonials form personalities like Buffalo Bill Cody and Sheriff Bat Masterson. It was intended as a pocket pistol for personal protection and home defense, with a lot made of how i...

The new Colt 633 Department of Energy clone from PSA/H&R was really quite a lot of fun to shoot, so I decided to take it to a PCSL match. This was basically a USPSA pistol match with two sets of targets, one for pistol and one for rifle (in theory PCSL goes out to much longer range, but that matc...

Primary Arms just recently announced their HTX-1 red dot, and it sounds pretty cool. From a technical perspective, it has a lot of good points - a clever adapter plate mounting system, two different reticles, and a fully enclosed emitter. However I think the more interesting (and less appreciated...

I'm speaking with Mike Branson of Gideon Optics at SHOT Show 2025, and today the topic is scope and reticle choice. What is good, what is bad, and what is best for you?

I met up with Mike Branson of Gideon Optics at SHOT Show 2025. Today, we are talking about red dot price and quality. It's easy to get a good red dot if you are willing to spend enough, but how cheap can you go and still have a reliable product?

Available from Schiffer Publishing as three separate volumes:

https://www.schiffermilitary.com/collections/military-new-releases/products/erma-erfurter-maschinenfabrik-1924-2003-vol-1

https://www.schiffermilitary.com/collections/military-new-releases/products/erma-erfurter-maschinenfabrik-1924-...

Mean Arms has developed probably the most refined and sophisticated 9mm AR delaying system on the market, what they call Bearing Delay. This began as an exploration into fitting HK-style roller delay into and AR, and ended up with a system using three spherical bearings to redirect chamber pressu...

Palmetto State Armory, under their Harrington & Richardson brand, has released a particularly neat model of 9mm AR. They talked about doing this "at some point" at SHOT Show 2024, but lo and behold it's here and available on the cusp of SHOT 2025! Specifically, this is the Colt 633, an extra-shor...

Circa 1954, Sweden was starting to look for a new self-loading rifle to adopt for its infantry. The 6.5x55mm cartridge was a good round, but the idea of having ammunition compatibility with its neighbors was appealing, and NATO was standardizing on the new 7.62x51mm round. This rifle is an experi...

After achieving independence from the British, Burma (now Myanmar) looked to develop a domestic small arms industry to supply its armed forces. The first weapon produced there was the BA-52, a copy of (how they chose this I don't know) the Italian TZ-45 submachine gun. By the late 1950s, talks we...

Today's Q&A is brought to you by the fine folks at Patreon, and by Penguin Brutality:

https://www.varusteleka.com/en/search?q=penguin
http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

01:11 - Was the Vickers .50 any good, and why did the British use 4 different heavy cartridges instead of consolidating?
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When CZ developed the vz.38 pistol for the Czechoslovak military, they made a number of attempts to also sell it on the international export market. This involved offering some various changes in configuration for different clients - in this case, scaling it down from .380ACP to .32 ACP. It also ...

Karl Brügger, CEO of B&T, is a true gun nerd and avid competitive shooter. When he got his hands on the Spectre SMG with its quad-stack magazine and weird DA/decocker fire control system, he thought it was really neat. So neat that he decided to buy the project from its Italian creators and put i...

What determines the rate of fire of a machine gun, and how can that rate of fire be determined or changed from a design perspective? Let's talk about pressure, mass, and distance...

Charles Sparrow Young was an extremely talent trap shooter around the turn of the century, sponsored by the Peters ammunition company. He was also a mechanical tinkerer, and developed several patents, including a shotgun release trigger. In 1901/2 he decided to design his own shotgun, and was gra...

After leaving the Zeller company, Hans Stamm went looking for work at major gun manufacturers like WF Bern and SIG. He ended up hired in 1907 by a company caller Saurer. This was an automotive firm looking to open a weapons division, with hopes of winning the upcoming trials for a new Swiss milit...

D-K Productions is a collaboration between the German company Sport System Dittrich (SSD) and an American partner. SSD has been making reproductions of German World War Two small arms for something like 20 years - including Sturmgewehrs. Their guns are really good recreations of the 1940s origina...

Black powder military rifles of the 1860s-1880s are a really enjoyable group of guns. A lot of them are relatively reasonably priced, and they are actually pretty easy to reload for. The unavailability of factory ammunition (for most, although not so much for the Trapdoor) makes them seem like a ...

Black powder military rifles of the 1860s-1880s are a really enjoyable group of guns. A lot of them are relatively reasonably priced, and they are actually pretty easy to reload for. The unavailability of factory ammunition (for most, although not so much for the Trapdoor) makes them seem like a ...

Black powder military rifles of the 1860s-1880s are a really enjoyable group of guns. A lot of them are relatively reasonably priced, and they are actually pretty easy to reload for. The unavailability of factory ammunition (for most, although not so much for the Trapdoor) makes them seem like a ...

The German military began looking for a new submachine gun design in secret in the mid 1930s. There is basically no surviving documentation, but the main contenders appear to have featured: Hugo Schmeisser's MK-36,II and Erma's EMP-36. Today we are taking a look at one of two known examples of th...

The German military began looking for a new submachine gun design in secret in the mid 1930s. There is basically no surviving documentation, but the main contenders appear to have featured: Hugo Schmeisser's MK-36,II and Erma's EMP-36. Today we are taking a look at the two known examples of the S...