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...

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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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Charles François Galand is best known for his simultaneous-extraction Model 1868, but he also developed a very good solid-frame revolver. This was specifically for the French 1871 military trials, which specifically required a solid frame. The Galand was chambered for 12mm Galand (with its distin...

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 ...

The GHM-9 is a 9mm PCC from B&T that was developed as an economized alternative to the APC-9. It uses the same grip assembly as the APC-9, but a smaller and simpler upper receiver and a few of the other parts are simplified - like non-captive recoil springs. It has a variety of modular options an...

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...

The ZB37 began in 1930 as a design by none other than classic Czech arms designer Vaclav Holek. The Czechoslovakian military was still using the Schwarzlose heavy MG, and wanted something to replace it. To fill all the roles intended, there would eventually be three different models of the ZB37 -...

After the success of the Glock 17 in Austrian military trials, the company chose two specific markets to target for expansion. One was competition shooters, for whom the Glock 17L was released. The other was the international law enforcement and military market, for whom they decided to make a ma...

Today's rifle was designed by a Swiss inventor named Hans Stamm while working for the Zeller et Cie company in Appenzell Switzerland. The company originally made embroidering machinery, but turned to military rifle parts subcontracting to bring in additional revenue in the early 1890s. Stamm had ...

After World War Two, there were a lot of K98k rifles left in Norway. Like, a whole lot of them. So many that even in the 1980s they were still a popular basis for hunting and competition rifles. The Norwegian military contracted with the firm Våpensmia to make a batch of their VS 84S hunting rifl...

Beretta's first machine pistol was actually a full-auto variant of the Model 1923, complete with shoulder stock - but that did not sell well. They tried again in the 1950s with an automatic model of the new Beretta Model 51 (aka M951). This was a 9x19mm pistol using a P38 style locking wedge, and...

Today we are taking a virtual tour of the Swiss Shooting Museum (Schweizer Schützenmuseum Bern) in Bern, Switzerland. The museum has been in this building since just before World War Two, and focusses on the history of the Swiss competitive shooting culture and community. At the time of posting, ...

In the film Blade Runner, Deckard carries a pistol called a Pfläger-Katsumata Series D 5223 - a name created by the fan community to have the initials "PKD" after Phillip K. Dick, who wrote Blade runner's source material (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep). What we are looking at today is an ex...