The Japanese Navy used several different types of flare pistols during World War Two (and in the decades before), but the most impressive looking of the bunch was the three-barreled Type 90 (not to be confused with the two-barreled model also designated Type 90). The three barrels were not simply...

The Japanese Army and Navy of the 1920s and 30s often used quite different equipment, and had a substantial interservice rivalry. Flare guns were one example of this separation, with the services using not just different flare pistols, but totally different flare cartridges. The Navy used a 28mm ...

This rifle, as best I can tell, is a prototype model made by Steyr in Switzerland in the early 1930s for use in Hungarian military trials. The Hungarians were looking to replace their old 1895 straight-pull Mannlicher rifles with something more modern. They wanted to keep their Mannlicher en bloc...

The British began World War Two with the Boys antitank rifle, but like all antitank rifles it rather quickly became obsolete. The replacement for it was adopted in 1942 as the PIAT - Projector, Infantry, Anti-Tank. This was a unique sort of weapon which fired a 3 pound (~1.35kg) hollow charge pro...

Combination knife/gun weapons have been popular gadgets for literally hundreds of years, and this is one of the nicest examples I have yet seen. This sort of thing is usually very flimsy, and not particularly well made. This one, however, has a blade which locks in place securely and would seem t...

Combination knife-gun devices have been popular for hundreds of years, spurred initially by the single-shot nature of early firearms. The designs evolved to incorporate revolver cylinders when the revolver was invented, and remain interesting to people even to the present day. Global Research And...

Made by Carl Gebert, a master gunsmith in Munich, this custom sporting rifle exhibits all the fancy options available in the 1870s or 1880s! The base action is an 1871 Mauser, which was a single shot rifle. However, this specially made one had been modified to us a fixed box magazine holding 3 or...

Virtually all nations in World War One had a periscope trench rifle of some sort, and the United States was no exception - although it was not formally adopted. The Cameron-Yaggi conversion was developed by James Cameron and Lawrence Yaggi of Cleveland Ohio, and submitted to the US Ordnance Depar...

The Burnside carbine was originally invented by Ambrose Burnside - the man who would later command the Army of the Potomac and after whom sideburns would be named. Burnside came up with the idea while stationed in Mexico as a young officer, and resigned his commission in 1853. A substantial amoun...

The M1915 bolo bayonet was originally the brainchild of US Army Captain Hugh D. Wise, Quartermaster with the 9th Infantry in the Philippines. In 1902, he recommended the implement in a letter to his superior officers, noting that a bolo style of bayonet (ie, one with a widened machete-like blade...

Charles Alsop patented the Alsop revolver design in 1861 and 1862, and produced it in two varieties - a .36 caliber Navy and a .31 caliber Pocket. The two were made in a single serial number range, with about 500 Navies and 300 Pockets. This Alsop Pocket is in excellent condition, and shops us a ...

One of the more interesting and unusual - and rare - variations of the M1903 Springfield is the version that was “Stripped for Air Service”. Contrary to common belief, these were not used as in-flight aircraft armament before the use of machine guns, or as antiaircraft armament for observation ba...

Although it was adopted by the Israeli military in the 1950s, the Uzi submachine gun did not generate much interest in the United States until the 1980s. The guns were used in limited numbers by the CIA covertly in Vietnam (and elsewhere), and also by various security elements of the US governmen...

Made by SSK Industries, the .950 JDJ is the largest sporting rifle made. The cartridge began as a 20mm Vulcan round, cut down to 70mm case length and necked up to 24mm (.95 caliber). It required a special sporting purposes exemption form the ATF to not be classified as a destructive device under ...

JD Jones’ .950 JDJ cartridge is a generally described as the largest sporting rifle cartridge ever produced, producing more energy than even the 4-bore cartridges that match it in bore diameter. Only three of these rifles were made, and the original loading was a 2600 grain (168g) cast bullet mov...

As usual, I have a recap today of the final prices of the guns I filmed form the most recent RIA auction (#71; September 2017). There were a bunch of machine guns in this one, although a variety of other things as well. I had gotten a lot of comments about the potential of my bidding on the Chate...

The deep beginnings of the Volcanic go back to Walter Hunt's Volitional Repeater, which became the Jennings repeating rifle, which then became the Smith-Jennings repeating rifle when Horace Smith was brought in to improve it. Smith was able to make it more commercially viable than the Jennings ha...

The TZ-45 is a late-war (some might say last ditch) Italian submachine gun made in small numbers and notable primarily for being the first SMG to use a grip safety on the magazine well. The grip safety on the TZ-45 is actually quite significant, as it locks the bolt in place when either cocked or...

There is very little documentation existing to explain the history of this rifle - all we really know is that per the receiver markings it is a Model 1936 Stendebach, and that it was brought back from Bavaria in 1945 by a US soldier who found it in a collection of confiscated firearms.

A numbe...

While the design for the Roper rifle and shotgun originally came from Sylvester Roper, Christopher Spencer played a very significant role in its production. When sales of the Spencer lever action rifle dissolved at the end of the Civil War, Spencer needed something new to work on, and Roper recru...

John W. Keene was an independent gun designer who developed this rifle (and took out 9 patents on its various features) in the 1870s. He did not have a factory at his disposal to produce the gun, so he went looking for manufacturing partners. The Remington company at that time had been heavily co...

The Reising Model 60 was the semiautomatic-only variant of the Reising Model 50 submachine gun. Offered side by side with the submachine guns, the Model 60 was also chambered for .45ACP and used the same magazines and a closed-bolt operating system that was identical except for the lack of a full...

In the late 1950s or early 1960s, Eugene Reising experimented with adapting the mechanism of his submachine guns to a locked-breech 7.62mm NATO military pattern rifle. The resulting rifle used an M14 gas piston and a bolt that was fully locked into the top of the receiver (instead of being a dela...

The PPS-43, designed by Alexei Sudayev based on a previous submachine gun design by I.K. Bezruchko-Vysotsky, was the Soviet replacement for the PPSh-41. The Shpagin submachine gun was a very effective combat weapon, but was time-consuming to produce and required specialized manufacturing tools. T...