"Desert Sniper" is an autobiographical account of Ed Nash's time fighting as a volunteer with Kurdish forces against ISIS in Syria in 2015 and 2016. Nash had been working as a volunteer with the Free Burma Rangers when he decided in 2015 that the growing list of ISIS atrocities demanded action. W...

What began as Harry Derby's "Hand Cannons of Imperial Japan" in 1981 was revised, expanded, and reprinted in collaboration with James Brown in 2003 as "Japanese Military Cartridge Handguns 1893-1945". That new edition is both the definitive guide to Japanese military handguns, but also a great e...

There is not really a good reference book available on Communist Bloc pistols - or at least there wasn't until now. George Layman has just released this overview of Cold War handguns from the USSR, Bulgaria, China, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, North Korea, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavi...

Recently, we have been looking at a selection of books on Cold War eastern bloc pistols - and James D. Brown's "Cold War Pistols of Czechoslovakia" is the best of them. While its scope is specifically on Czechoslovakian pistols, it provides a wealthy of information for the collector, histories, a...

George Chinn's 5-volume opus machine gun-icus is a massive and extremely valuable reference work on the development of machine guns, as well as aircraft machine guns and aircraft cannon. It also includes and entire volume on the actual technical design of self-loading firearms systems, including ...

Until now, there has really been nothing substantial and scholarly printed on the Chassepot needle-fire rifle in English - but now that has changed, thanks to Guy & Leonard A-R-West. Their just-released book on the system covers everything from the development (including several competing systems...

The expanded second edition of Frank Iannamico's "AK47: The Grim Reaper" is a hefty 1100-page tome which tackles the ambition goal of being a single reference for all things Kalashnikov. Ot begins with a section on Soviet development of the AK rifle starting at the Type 1 and proceeding through ...

In the years following World War Two, the Bernardelli company in Italy made an attempt to enter the full-power pistol market with a simple blowback 9mm Parabellum design. They basically scaled up their existing .32/.380 pocket pistol designs to the larger cartridge, and actually designed this new...

Today at the Kessler auction house in Kreuzlingen Switzerland we are taking a look at the W+F Bern C42 and E22 rifles. These are the guns supplied by Bern to compete for the Swiss military Sturmgewehr 90 trials. The C=type ones are chambered for the 5.56mm cartridge, but Swiss adoption of that ca...

Made after World War Two until 1957, the Ballester Campeon was a .22 rimfire competition pistol built on the frame of the Argentine Ballester-Molina .45 ACP service pistol. Two versions were made, a standard 5 inch (127mm) barrel with normal sights and the longer 7.5 inch (190mm) Campeon model wi...

The AR-10 rifle was developed in the United States (Hollywood California, specifically) by Eugene Stoner, but the Armalite company did not have a suitable large scale manufacturing facility to produce the number of guns they expected to sell to military forces. Instead, a deal was struck to licen...

Century International Arms has imported a quantity of Ethiopian ammunition, and asked me to do a video on it. So, I have a three-part evaluation here: appearance and packaging, live fire testing (including velocity and consistency), and teardown and bullet weight consistency. This ammunition was ...

The Ambidex was a rifle developed by the Musgrave company in South Africa in the late 1980s. It was a straight-pull bolt action rifle inspired by the Browning T-Bolt, but with the ability to have the bolt swapped to either the left or right side for ambidextrous use. They were chambered for the ....

The US insistence on a full-power rifle cartridge for the NATO standard in the 1950s derailed a couple potentially very interesting concepts - including the 7.92x41mm CETME cartridge. This round was developed by Dr. Gunther Voss, formerly of Mauser, while working with other ex-Mauser employees li...

Charles Clement is best known for a series of civilian pocket pistol made in the years before World War One, but today we are looking at a prototype Clement military pistol from 1914. This gun retains most of the same mechanical features of Clement's pocket guns, but is scaled up to the 9x20mm Br...

Well, my 8mm French Chauchat finally cleared transfer, as did my application to reactivate it. This was a "dewat", or "Deactivated War Trophy" - a machine gun put on the NFA registry but modified to be non-firing. This is not the same as legal destruction, as the receiver of the gun remained inta...

The Pancor Jackhammer was a select-fire combat shotgun designed by John Anderson in the 1980s. He was a Korean War veteran who had used a pump shotgun in combat, and while he liked the shotgun concept, he felt there must be a more efficient way to make a shotgun than a single-loading pump action....

The Winchester 1897 was the gun that really set the standard for the now-ubiquitous pump action shotgun. It was designed by John Browning, but was not the first pump action designed and sold. That credit goes to Christopher Spencer, who put the first pump action on the market in 1882. His patent ...

US M3 37mm Anti-Tank Gun (including slow motion!)

Starr revolvers are one of the less recognized designs used in the US Civil War, although tens of thousands of them were made and issued. Indeed, in many ways they were superior to the much more common Colt and Remington revolvers of the period. One of the interesting facts about the Starr is tha...

Right at the beginning of the 20th century, there were 3 options on the market for semiauto commercial sporting rifles in the US: the Remington Model 8, the Winchester 1905/1907 Self-Loader, and the Standard Arms Model G. The Remington and Winchester were both good guns, and sold well - the Stand...

John Browning's Auto-5 long recoil shotgun was the first mass-produced semiauto shotgun, and would eventually become the second best-selling semiauto shotgun in the world (not bad for the first one to hit the market). It was patented in 1900 and initially manufactured by FN in Belgium, with Remin...

The Steyr M1912, or Steyr Hahn (meaning "hammer", to distinguish it from the striker-fired Steyr 1907) has a number of features that make it unusual among pistols today. It uses a fixed internal magazine fed via stripper clips, and a short recoil, rotating barrel locking system. Only a handful of...

The M1878 was the last new rifle produced by the Sharps company before it went out of business in 1881. It was the invention of none other than German gun designer Hugo Borchardt, better known for his C93 Borchardt automatic pistol (generally considered the first commercially successful automatic...