The Swedish Pansarvärnsgevär fm/42 made by the Carl Gustav company was an interesting early hybrid antitank weapon - a recoilless rifle firing solid armor-piercing projectiles. It used a 20x180mm case, propelling the 108g (1650gr) bullet at 950 m/s (3150 fps). This was capable of perforating 40mm...

Al Ljutic (LEW-tic) was quite the interesting character, from his early days as a professional boxer to his selection for the US 1940 Olympic rifle team, to his eventual primary business making excellent high-end trap shotguns. One of the first was a gun he built for himself which wound up becomi...

One of the handguns that resulted from the post-WW2 interest in standardizing arms among the future members of NATO was a lightweight version of the Canadian produced Browning High Power. Experiments began in 1947 to create first a lightened slide by milling out unnecessary material, and then add...

Le Petit Protector is a ring pistol, made in both 5 shot/5mm and 6 shot/4mm pinfire variations, as well as a smaller version holding 7 rounds of 2mm pinfire, called the “Femme Fatale”. They are mechanically quite simple, with a manually cocked hammer, manually indexed cylinder, and can be reloade...

The US began looking for a cost-effective replacement for the Thompson submachine gun in 1942, and the “Grease Gun” was the result. Designed by George Hyde (a noted firearms designer at the time) and Frederick Sampson (GM/Inland chief engineer), it was a very simple and almost entirely stamped fi...

Produced by Alexandre Fagnus of Liege, this is a military style, six-shot, .450 caliber revolver with a particularly interesting and unusual unloading mechanism. The rear half of the trigger guard is a lever which can be rotated 90 degrees out from the frame, unlocking the barrel and cylinder. Th...

The SVD Dragunov was the Soviet marksman's rifle that finally replaced the failed attempt to issue the SVT-40 as a precision rifle. It was introduced in 1963, after about 5 years of development, and its scarcity in the United States has led to the development of a loyal and dedicated group of adm...

Designed by Adolf Furrer, this carbine represents a very early experiment with intermediate power ammunition. It is a long recoil semiautomatic carbine with an under barrel tube magazine - quite the interesting combination of 19th and 20th centuries! The cartridge used was the experimental Swiss ...

For several decades, the Beretta company’s handguns and submachine guns were nearly all designed by the very talented Tulio Marengoni…but nothing can last forever. After World War 2, Beretta engineer Domenico Salza began working on a new SMG design, one which would be more compact and more contro...

After failing to acquire a license to produce the M16 rifle, Beretta worked with SIG from 1963 through 1968 to develop 5.56mm infantry rifles. When the companies parted ways, SIG went on to produce the SIG-540 and Beretta developed the AR-70. It was introduced on the market in 1972, and was adopt...

The Nambu Automatic Pistol Type B, or “Baby Nambu” as it is known in US collecting circles, is a scaled-down companion to the 1902 “Grandpa” Nambu pistol. It was intended as a private purchase option for officers who needed to carry a sidearm, but did not want or need a full size service pistol. ...

This is a reposting of a video from September 2016 with a new introduction. The recent publication of the new and expanded edition of Hans-Dieter Handrich's book "Sturmgewehr!" has revealed new information about the history of this rifle which I wanted to put into the video.

German arms develo...

We do have some great questions this time around! Specifically:

0:25 - Gain twist rifling, description and application
5:40 - The 6.5mm Arisaka compared to modern 6.5mm cartridges
7:44 - US abandonment of the M1917 Enfield in favor of the 1903 Springfield after WW1
12:02 - Guns I am hyped t...

Following up on yesterday's history and disassembly of the PSM, today we are taking it out to the range for some shooting. In addition, wehave some generic Level IIIA soft body armor to test. We will see if the vaunted PSM can do better than the 7.62x25mm Tokarev - another Soviet handgun widely r...

The PSM is a Soviet pistol from the late 1970s which has gotten itself quite the fanciful reputation here in the US, thanks to extreme rarity and some imaginative magazine articles. Common lore would have you believe that the PSM and its 5.45x18mm bottlenecked cartridge is capable of astounding f...

The Soviet PPSh-41 submachine gun is most distinctive for its very high rate of fire - approximately 1250 rounds/minute - and large drum magazine. What may come as a surprise to those who have not tried it is how this very high rate of fire does not actually make the weapon difficult to control o...

After making the decision to mass produce a submachine gun, the Soviet Union adopted the Degtyarev PPD-38 and PPD-40, but this design was too expensive for the huge scale of production that the USSR intended. A new design was needed, and was put into development almost as soon as the PPD was ente...

During the transition from Dutch colonial rule to independence, the Dutch government armed a group of Papuans to help defend the territory from Indonesian military incursion. This organization was the Papuan Vrijwiliger Korps (Papua Volunteer Corps), and the Dutch provided them with Mauser carbin...

If I could have any one machine gun (but only one), it would be a PKM - in my experience thus far, this is the best universal machine gun that has been designed. Kalashnikov's design team took the lessons of the MG42 and created a machine gun that does an excellent job of balancing the capabiliti...

The PK machine gun was developed by Mikhail Kalashnikov's engineering team right about the time they were putting the finishing touches on the AKM. The PK is in many ways an AK rifle action enlarged, flipped upside-down, and mated with a belt feed mechanism. It uses the same belt design as the pr...

The SIG PE-57 is the civilian semiauto version of the Stgw57, Switzerland's first self-loading service rifle. Developed from the German MG-42 but incorporating a substantial influence form the FG-42 as well, the PE-57 is a roller-delayed blowback action chambered for the 7.5x55mm Swiss cartridge....

Today we are looking at a unique rifle in the National Firearms Centre collection - at first glance it appears to be an AK in a full-length rifle cartridge, using a Bren gun magazine. A closer look will show that it is actually a bolt action rifle, and a careful inspection just makes things stran...

Today, we have a chance to take a look at a suppressed M3 "Grease Gun", as purchased and issued by the Office of Strategic Services (the OSS; predecessor to the CIA). Thanks to its readily removable barrel, the M3 (and M3A1) submachine gun was an easy gun to adapt to use with a suppressor (or as ...

Norinco is a huge consortium of manufacturing plants in China that make all manner of goods for export, including military hardware. One of Norinco's factories has been making copies of the American M14 rifle for export for some time, although they are not seen in the United States because Chines...