The EM-1 was one of the British post-WWII rifle development projects with the ambitious goal of replacing both the infantry rifle and the submachine gun with a single select-fire weapon optimized for combat within 600 meters (as opposed to the prior doctrine of 1000m effective ranges). The design...

The Korsac EM-1 (not to be confused with the Thorpe EM-1, which is a completely different rifle) was a bullpup light machine gun based on captured examples of the German FG-42 patatroop rifle. It was developed between 1945 and 1947 by a team led by Polish refugee designer named Korsac.

It was ...

Snabb was a Swedish company created to market a system for converting bolt action rifles into semiautomatic rifles. The system was patented in the US in 1938, making this one of the very last attempts at such a conversion. It appears that the company made a substantial number of overtures to many...

Manufactured by Rheinmetall and designed by Louis Stange, this light .32ACP (7.65mm Browning) carbine is a bit of a mysterious item. Very little written information exists about it, but we know it was sold on the commercial market as it appears in several firearms sale catalogs and it is, frankly...

I have had a parts kit for a Soviet DPM light machine gun (actually a Polish one, but the design is identical) stashed away for many years now, with the hope to eventually have it built into a live gun. When I found out that SMG (maker the the sweet semiauto FG42 replicas) was making a new produc...

The DeLisle carbine was a conversion of a standard SMLE rifle to the .45 ACP cartridge, feeding from modified 1911 pistol magazines. It was fitted with a 7" (175mm) barrel and a very large integral suppressor. The combination of the subsonic cartridge, the large suppressor volume, and even a soun...

Every time I say "carbine" on film, I get a bunch of people complaining that I'm saying it wrong. So...am I?

Captain Percy Fraser, DSO was born on January 22, 1879 and died in Ypres on the night of February 23, 1915 while attempting to aid men wounded outside their trench. His unit of the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders would suffer horrendous casualties at Ypres, and today we will look at his Webley-Fo...

The VP9 "Veterinary Pistol" (um...yeah) from Brugger & Thomet is a manually operated 9x19mm handgun with a quite effective suppressor built right onto the barrel. It is, in fact, a remarkably close copy of the British SOE Welrod pistol from World War II, right down to some pretty minor details.
...

Great Britain was one of the few countries that went into World War Two with virtually no submachine gun development. Not every country had an issued SMG by 1939, but virtually everyone had at least been working on experimental concepts - except the British. It was only with the outbreak of hosti...

The Breda PG ("Presa Gas" - Gas Operated) was developed by Sestilio Fiorini in 1931 and put into production at Breda's factory in Rome. It was offered as a weapon for commercial sale and export, as well as being one of the several entrants in Italy's semiautomatic rifle trials in the late 1930s. ...

The Breda Model 30 was the standard Italian light machine gun of World War II, and is a serious contender for “worst machine gun ever”. Yes, given the choice we would prefer to have a Chauchat (which really wasn’t as bad as people today generally think).

The Breda 30 suffered from all manner o...

Written by Josef Mötz and‎ Joschi Schuy, "Vom Ursprung der Selbstladepistole" (Origins of the Automatic Pistol) is an absolute gold mine of information on early manually operated and self loading pistols. It is limited to Austro-Hungarian designs and is available only in German, but even so it re...

Get your copy here: https://www.vickersguide.com

Larry Vickers and James Rupley have expanded the Vickers Guide series of coffee table books to World War Two Germany, to look at one of the periods of the most rapid small arms development in world history. And, in light of full disclosure, they...

It may look like an airport bookshop thriller, but don't let the cover fool you - Dr. Matthew Ford's "Weapon of Choice: Small Arms and the Culture of Military Innovation" is a seriously rigorous academic study of the military small arms adoption process. The process is examined through the lens o...

Get your copy here: https://www.vickersguide.com

Larry Vickers and James Rupley have followed their first volume of AR-15s with a second one - as we should have expected when the first one was title "Volume I". Where the first volume covered the early development of the AR by Armalite and Colt...

https://www.vickersguide.com

I don't normally have much interest in coffee-table books, and the Vickers Guide: AR-15 would definitely be considered a coffee-table book. That said, it is substantially different than most such books, and much more worthy of a place in a firearms reference library....

"The UZI Submachine Gun: Examined" is a newly published book this year by David Gaboury - long time owner and operator of the uzitalk.com forum. Until now there has not really been any substantive written reference material on the Uzi, but Gaboury has certainly changed that!

The Uzi has not r...

Ian Skennerton is a leading authority on British rifles, having written extensively on Sniders, Martinis, Enfields, and more. This specific book, "The Lee Enfield" is the most recent iteration of his compendium of Lee-Enfield information, printed in 2007 (previous versions were "The Lee Enfield S...

Since we are in the midst of an ongoing video series looking at the development of the SA80 weapons family, I figured this would be a good time to mention the single best source of written information on that program: Steve Raw's book "The Last Enfield: SA80 The Reluctant Rifle". Published in 200...

Written in 1997, Timothy Mullin's "Testing the War Weapons" sets out to provide a practical users guide to a wide variety of military rifles and light machine guns from the late 1800s to the present day. Unfortunately, the book suffers for lack of good editing, and comes out rather dry and repeti...

Until recently, there has been very little published information on South African and Rhodesian firearms outside of a few sporadic magazine articles - but that is no longer the case! The Pretoria Arms and Ammunition Association has recently published the epic results of a 17-person, 8.5 year long...

"The Schmeisser Myth: German Submachine Guns Through Two World Wars" is a newly published history of SMG development from the Villar Perosa and MP18 through the MP38 and MP40, written by Martin Helebrant. Given that it is published by Collector Grade, it should be no surprise that it is an excell...

"Pistolas y Subfusiles de la República Producción de Guerra" is a new 580-page reference book about the pistols and submachine guns made in the Republican zone during the Spanish Civil War. It is written by three authors - Josep Mª Abad, Manuel Estirado, and Francisco Fuentes - and printed exclus...