During the Chinese civil war in the 1920s and 30s, international arms embargoes made rifles difficult to acquire - which led to a lot of popularity for pistols with shoulder stocks. The C96 "broomhandle" Mauser in particular was popular, and it was copied by a number of Spanish firms for sale in ...

The Vickers machine gun was an evolution of the Maxim, the world's first successful machine gun. The Vickers was adopted by the British armed forces shortly before World War I and remained in active service until 1968. It is renowned as one of the most durable and reliable machine guns ever made,...

Sylvester Roper was a great example of the classic American inventor - he had a wide range of interests, and affected technological development in more than one industry. This shotgun is a design he patented in 1866, which uses a 4-round magazine of the 12ga shells. It has an unusual mechanism wh...

The ZH-29 was the brainchild of noted Czech arms designer Emmanuel Holek in the late 1920s. It was one of the earliest practical and reliable semiauto rifles available, although Holek and the Brno factory were unable to secure any large orders for it (the three known orders total about 500 rifles...

Before he adapted it to .45 caliber for US Army pistol trials, Jens Schouboe was building his pistol design in .32 ACP (7.65mm Browning). It was a blowback action, hammer fired, and very quick and easy to field strip. The gun was reliable and well made, but just didn't catch on in the market, and...

There isn't much I can say about this one, as I have no idea who made it or when. What I can tell is that it is a blowback action with a rather unique "rocking block" type of bolt and what appears to be a clock style coiled flat spring for the hammer.

Colonel Jean Alexandre LeMat was a native Frenchman who emigrated to the United States and in 1856 secured a patent for a "grapeshot revolver", which had both a 9-shot .42 caliber cylinder and a 20-gauge smoothbore barrel acting as the cylinder axis. A moveable striking surface on the hammer allo...

John Pedersen was one of the more prolific and successful gun designers in American history, having even been described by John Moses Browning as "the greatest gun designer in the world". And yet, many people only know about Pedersen from his unsuccessful toggle-locked rifle or his WWI Pedersen D...

In the years after WWII, several countries experimented with general-use optical sights on service rifles. The Germans had pioneered the concept with the ZF-41 long eye relief optic during the war (and the ZF-4, to some extent), and the British actually adopted the EM-2 with a permanently-mounted...

Until the middle of the 20th century, the most powerful automatic pistol made was Sir Hugh Gabbett-Fairfax's Mars pistol. With the .45 caliber version approaching the energy of a .45 Winchester Magnum, it was quite the accomplishment for a gun designed initially in 1898! Well, RIA has a very earl...

Not all companies responded in the same way to the development of cartridge revolvers and the Rollin White patent. Allen & Wheelock, for example, decided to simply ignore the patent and make revolvers for their proprietary lipfire cartridges (fairly similar to rimfire) while relying on their lawy...

After he failed to win US military adoption of his toggle-locked rifle design, John Pedersen went looking for other countries that might be interested in the gun. One of these was Japan, which experimented with toggle-locked Pedersen rifles and carbines for several years in the early/mid 1930s. T...

The most common Japanese pistols used during World War II were the Type 14 and Type 94 Nambu designs, by a huge margin. However, there were a number of other handguns used in small numbers, and today we're looking at two of those. The first is the Sugiura, essentially a copy of the Colt 1903 made...

Gustloff was a large industrial concern in Germany which made many different weapons for the military. In addition to these, its attempted to market a small-caliber pistol for police or SS use. This pistol used an alloy frame (with steel inserts for durability in crucial areas) and steel slide, w...

During the 1920s and 1930s, a combination of civil wars and international arms embargoes led to a lot of domestic firearms production in China. The size and quality of manufacturing facilities varied widely - everything from massive factories established with European technical assistance to one-...

Andrew Burgess was an extremely prolific gun designer who gets very little recognition today. One of has particularly interesting weapons was a pump-action, folding shotgun. Because Spencer already had a patent on the use of the forearm as the pump, Burgess designed his gun to use a sliding sleev...

The Blake was one of many rifle designs submitted to the US Army trials that would ultimately result in the adoption of the Krag-Jorgensen as the US Army's standard rifle. The main innovation of Blake's design was a unique ammunition "packet" system which held 7 cartridges. The rifle would be loa...

Siam, now known as Thailand, was one of the few independent south Asian nations around the turn of the 20th century. Looking to modernize its military to protect against colonial imposition, is decided in 1903 to adopt a copy of the Mauser Gewehr 98 rifle. Siam (which changed its name to Thailand...

Today's book is really more of a pamphlet than a proper book, but it still serves well given its purpose. It is Rifles of the Snow by Doug Bowser and Powers Dunaway, and it is an introduction and basic handbook of Finnish military rifles - specifically Mosin-Nagants. While Finland used a wide var...

During WWII, the Turkish government wound up in possession of several thousand (between 5k and 10k) French Berthier rifles, mostly 1907/15 models, but also some Mle 1916s. There is some question as to exactly how, but the most likely explanation appears to be a shipment of arms from Syria to Iraq...

The M60 light machine gun is something of a contentious subject. Many veterans who used it in combat in Vietnam remember it very fondly despite its design defects, while many more recent users detest it. I think I know why - because many of the M60s flaws were related to its long-term durability,...

We met up with Greg - who runs Allegheny Arsenal - at a gun show a couple weeks ago, and this is the first of a couple interviews we did with him on the MG34 and its mount. Greg can do anything that needs to be done to a Lafette mount, and stocks all the parts you'll need to get your 34 running a...

Today, we take a look at a reproduction FP45 Liberator pistol. These pistols were originally designed to be scattered across occupied Europe in huge numbers, and literally a million of them were made during WWII. The plans fell through, though, and almost all of them were simply scrapped.

While we were visiting the Institute of Military Technology, we took a few minutes to check out their two 5-barrel Nordenfelt guns and chat with Joe from GardnerGuns.com about them. The Nordenfelt was one of the early manually-operated "machine guns" not seen much in the United States (the Gatlin...