The Jenks carbine was a remarkably svelte and elegant breechloading system patented by South Carolinian William Jenks in 1838. It was tested by the US Navy in 1841, and found to be quite successful. The Navy would proceed to adopt it, and order 1,000 rifles and 5,250 carbines from N.P. Ames in th...

The H&K SR9 was a the version of the H&K G3/91 designed to comply with (or avoid, if you prefer) the Bush Sr. 1989 import ban on “assault weapons”. About 4,000 of these were imported between 1990 and 1998, and they featured a bare muzzle and plastic thumbhole stock and handguard. The first 1000 o...

Patented by one John Hall of Cumberland, England in 1902, this is a device intended to scare birds out of a field at regular intervals. It has twelve chambers for 12-gauge pinfire shotgun shells, which are fired by falling steel weights. Those weights are held up by thin cotton strings which are ...

When the Browning Arms Company first began importing semiautomatic FAL rifles from FN in 1959, the submitted an example for evaluation, and ATF determined that it was not a machine gun. The rifle was made with a selector that could not be moved to the fully automatic position, and did not have th...

Production of the Colt Pocket Hammerless (aka the Model M) pretty much died at the end of World War Two. Military contracts ended, and the civilian market was quite weak - Colt shipped just 132 of the .32 caliber guns between 1946 and 1953, and only a handful of .380s at the same time. Several pr...

In the early 1970s, Colt wanted to develop a new military pistol so that it could offer a modern replacement for the venerable 1911. Colt Engineer Robert Roy designed the new gun in 1971, and was granted patents on it in 1972. It was made entirely of stainless steel, had a 15 round capacity (in 9...

In 1994, a man named Mark Westrom, owner of Eagle Arms, purchased the husk of the Armalite corporation, and acquired its trademarks. Westrom wanted to create a new commercial .308 AR pattern rifle, and did so under the Armalite AR-10 name. He developed an AR-10 which borrowed some elements from t...

The Swiss replaced their Vetterli rifles in the late 1880s with the new Schmidt-Rubin pattern, and this eventually trickled down to the cadet corps. These youth programs had been using short single-shot 1870 Vetterli carbines, but as those became obsolete and in need of replacement, the 1897 Kade...

The Reibel Modele M31 was the variation of the French Chatellerault M24/29 light machine gun made for use in vehicles and fortifications. In accordance with that role, it lacked a buttstock or sights (these were integrated into the vehicle or fortress mounts), was fitted with a very heavy barrel ...

When South Africa decided to replace the R1 rifle (a metric FAL), they chose to adopt the Israeli Galil. Both nations had similar environmental issues with blowing sand (in northwestern South Africa particularly), and Israel was one of the few nations willing to trade arms with South Africa in th...

Today we are looking at - and shooting - a one of a kind .22 rimfire conversion kit for the Galil developed by South African designer Tony Neophytou (better known for the Neostead shotgun, Neopup grenade launcher, and NTW-20 anti-material rifle). The idea here is to convert a standard R4 Galil se...

I think this is the longest Q&A to date...and as usual, I had far more questions submitted by you awesome Patrons than I could answer, so if yours didn't get in this time please submit it again next time.

0:00:37 - The Stoner 63 and value of modular platforms
0:03:37 - Forgotten Weapons on In...

On to our questions...

0:50 - Berthier type iron sights on military rifles
2:15 - Books covering all US military small arms
3:25 - 4.85mm British compared to its contemporaries
4:19 - Alternative history: PMC armament in the 20s and 30s
8:19 - What gun do I dislike the most?
8:40 - How to...

00:30 - Belts or links, and why?
04:53 - What determines locations of gun manufacturing centers?
06:40 - Why did France not use 7.62 NATO?
09:38 - CMMG Guard, yea or nay?
12:32 - How do/did proof houses actually work?
15:45 - History of the 6mm Lee Navy (to be expanded into a standalone vide...

Who will win? One big spring, or two dedicated gun nerds?

The Soviet Union had originally eschewed the use of large numbers of antitank rifles, anticipating that any potential combat use of them would be largely against tanks impervious to AT rifle cartridges. However, when German forces came flooding across the border in 1941, the Soviet Union found th...

This pistol is one of just a couple surviving from a development project run by Walther in the mid to late 1930s. The goal was to produce a compact sidearm for pilots and officers using a more potent cartridge than the .32ACP or .380. To do this, Walther split the dimensional difference on case l...

Today's Special Presentation is an overview of all the semiautomatic pistols that were actually put into serial production before the year 1900. We have looked at these individually before, but I think it is worthwhile to examine them together in context, to gain a better understanding of what th...

Poland was one of the states which manufactured the Soviet PPS-43 submachine gun under license, but they decided to make a change to is in 1952. Where the original PPS-43 used a top-folding metal stock, the Poles decided to instead add a fixed wooden buttstock. This made the gun substantially mor...

I had a chance to visit Hire Arms in Johannesburg - a movie arms supply company. Among many other things in their collection, they had an assortment of extremely crude handmade firearms confiscated from poachers in Zimbabwe. As something we don't see much of here in the US, I thought they were pr...

Since I had the opportunity to do some shooting with both a Yugoslav PKM and a Czech vz.59 general-purpose machine gun, I thought it would be interesting to compare them side by side. Which is better as a proper machine gun? And, to make things interesting, which is better as a semiauto-only fire...

Developed in 1978 and produced by Llama until 1995, the Pressin was a two-shot derringer made to be disguised as a pair of glasses. It was intended for use by politicians, military officers, and other potential victims of kidnapping by groups like the ETA. It held two rounds of a special 7.65mm E...

Some collectors hunt for firearms which look perfectly new form the factory, and others prefer arms that show lots of evidence of use and history. Well, this is definitely one of the latter type - this 1943 production MP40 submachine gun has a terrible finish, most likely as a result of being bur...

The Kommando semiauto carbine was designed in 1975 by Alexis du Plessis in Rhodesia, and went on the be manufactured in South Africa a few years later by the Maxim Parabellum company. The final iteration of the design came in 1980/81 with this, the Paramax. The molded lower housing of the Kommand...