Designed by Austrian immigrant Joseph Joachim Reifgraber, this is a prototype gas-assisted short recoil pistol in a .38 rimmed revolver cartridge. While this version did not see any serial production, the Union Firearms Company of Toledo (Ohio) did market a slightly smaller model in .32 S&W (and ...

The Gewehr 1871 was the first rifle adopted by the newly-formed German state after its unification at the end of the Franco-Prussian War. It replaced the decades-old Dreyse needle rifles, and fired an 11x60mm black powder cartridge. It was the first significant rifle designed by the Mauser brothe...

The Tucker & Sherrard (and later Sherrard & Clark) is one of the more interesting Texas Confederate revolvers. The company initially was granted a contract with the Texas state government to provide 100 revolvers per month at $50 each, and took a total of $10,000 of investment capital from the st...

This is quite the eye-catching pair of revolvers...

The Model 1870 Gasser was a behemoth of a pistol designed by Leopold Gasser for the Austro-Hungarian cavalry - it was built around the 11x36mm cartridge used in their Werndl cavalry carbines. This cartridge was a middle ground between rifle a...

The Cochran turret revolver is one of the more common turret revolvers in the US, although that's a pretty low bar, as only about 150 of them were made. Turret-sytle revolvers never became popular on the commercial market because of the potential hazards posed by a chainfire when one has chambers...

The German military used a lot of different small-caliber pistols during World War One, and the Jager is one of the most interesting of them. Its unique design was the result of needing to build pistols for the war effort on machines and tooling that were not suited for pistol production. The an...

Alkartasuna SA was a company formed in 1914 by a handful of disgruntled Astra (well, Astra was still called Esperanza y Unceta at that time) employees. This was a difficult time for the Eibar gun industry - demand was low, their reputation for quality was not good (the lack of a central proof hou...

I had a chance to get my hands on one of the new-production M1 Carbines being sold by MKS Supply under the Inland trademark. These guns have gotten a lot of press recently, and I have been interested in how they might perform. The original M1 Carbine has an interestingly mixed reputation - GIs te...

The Swiss military dabbled in revolvers with their rimfire 1872 model (about 900 made) and the followup 1878 centerfire version (5500-6000 made), but their first large-scale service revolver was the Model 1882, designed by Colonel Schmidt (yeah, the same guy who did the rifles). The 1882 is a 7.5...

The Model 1920 was Star's first locked-breech pistol, basically a combination of features from the Colt 1911 and their traditional Eiber blowback .32 pistols. It was tested by the Spanish Army in 1920, with inconclusive results. The Guardia Civil, however, found it to be suitable and adopted it a...

After a series of pistol trials, Norway adopted a copy of the Colt 1911 in .45 ACP as its standard service pistol in 1914. A license was purchased from FN (while under German occupation, interestingly) to produce the guns locally at Kongsberg, and production ran slowly and sporadically until Germ...

Before adopting the M1891 Mosin-Nagant, the Russian Empire (like most major militaries) used a large-bore single-shot rifle as its standard infantry rifle. In this case, a .42-caliber rifle designed by American General Hiram Berdan (yes, the same guy who invented the Berdan primer). As with other...

Today's firearm is not a normal gun; it is a conversion of a Spencer into a shotgun. My question is, what path did this weapon travel? What did it begin as, and how did it come to be in its current form?

Let's see if we can puzzle this out looking at the evidence in the gun itself...

We have all seen plenty of sporter CETME rifles and civilian HK-91s, but when the G3 was new to the Germany military, there was already an interest in bringing semiauto versions into the US. The Golden State Arms Corporation was the first to do so, with three batches of imports in 1962 (just 3 ye...

Five different companies in Germany produced designs for the last-ditch Volkssturm bolt action rifles, and they were designated VG-1 through VG-5. The VG-2 was developed by the Spreewerke company, and differed from the others in its use of a sheet metal stamped receiver (and consequently a pretty...

The most popular shotgun made by the French Darne company was their 1897 sliding breech side-by-side, which saw sales and use worldwide. Before that, however, Darne invented a rotating breechblock system - first a series of external hammer varieties in the 1880s and then this hammerless Model 189...

Just as production of the .32ACP Type Hamada pistols was reaching full scale, Bunji Hamada was asked to redesign his pistol to use the standard 8mm Nambu cartridge. This he did, and after several changes required by the Army (which appear to have had more to do with giving the Army some claim to ...

The Steyr-Hahn is one of the less glamorized pistols used in WWI, despite being made in quite large numbers (250,000-313,000, depending on who you read). The gun is an interesting mix of features, including bits from the Roth-Steyr M1907 and the early Colt/Browning 1900/1902/1903 pistols. The gun...

In this 2-Gun match, I am competing as a WWI US infantryman, with an M1917 Eddystone rifle and an M1911 pistol (both are genuine WWI-era originals). I am also using a reproduction US 1917 uniform from Mike's Militaria. It's a fantastic quality reproduction, made from the same patterns and materia...

The Czech-made ZK-383 submachine gun is a bit of an oddball in the world of submachine guns. It has several design features typically associated with rifle-caliber light machine guns - an integral bipod and a quick-change barrel. In fact, the ZK-383 was designed to be a hybrid gun, usable as eith...

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States spent 12 years looking for a successor to the M1 Garand rifle. The new standard infantry arm was expected to be select-fire, lightweight, accurate, controllable, and fire a heavy .30-caliber projectile. It would replace not just the M1, but also...

Today we are taking a look at two unusual magazines from unusual firearms. These are a 60-round double-column mag from a Springfield 1964 SPIW bullpup and a 50-round box magazine from an AAI XM-19 serial flechette rifle.

For lots more information on Project SPIW, the best source is "SPIW: The ...

The Type 100 (sometimes called the Type 0) was one of the initial Japanese experiments in paratroop rifles. Manufactured from standard Nagoya Arsenal Type 99 rifles, the Type 100 used a set of interrupted lugs at the chamber to allow the rifle to be broken into two short sections. Only a few hund...

Humans have been killing animals for thousands of years, and with the development of the self-contained cartridge, the Greener company started making a compact and efficient Humane Horse Killer. Used by veterinarians for euthanizing creatures (versions were made for pretty much all major domestic...