Benjamin Hotchkiss was an American artillery designer who moved to Paris in 1867 in hopes of building a business for his improvements in artillery shells. He experienced the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, and understood the failure of the French Mitrailleuse multi-barrel volley guns. In his opinion...

The gun that became the Hotchkiss 1914 and served as the bulwark of French and American forces in World war One was actually first designed and patented by an Austrian officer; Adolph von Odkolek. He took his idea to the Hotchkiss company in Paris hoping to arrange for them to produce it under li...

The Heym SR30 is a modern hunting rifle produced in Thuringia, Germany using a rather clever and interesting locking system. It is a straight-pull rifle with six ball bearings around the circumference of the bolt head. When the bolt handle it forward, it forces a central plunger down the interior...

Developed between 1883 and 1889 by Lt. William Driggs and Commander (later Admiral) Seaton Schroeder, the Driggs cannon was an improvement on the market-standard Hotchkiss quick-fire cannon of the day. By quick-fire, I am referring to a single-shot cannon that has a recoil mechanism and ejects it...

The John Inglis company in Toronto first opened in 1859 as a metalworking shop, and grew steadily over the decades under first John Inglis, and then later his sons. Inglis did substantial amounts of military work during World War One, but the Great Depression hit it hard, and both William and Ale...

Today we are looking at the results from the Morphy's April 2019 sale to see what happened with the guns that I featured in videos over the last few weeks.

After the commercial failure of Gordon Ingram’s M6 submachine gun in the early 50s, we would radically change the layout of his designs. Instead of a Thompson lookalike Ingram’s M10 (the M7, M8, and M9 doing experimental prototypes only) would be a boxy and compact affair with a Czech-style teles...

The Dreyse needle fire rifle was invented by Niclaus von Dreyse in 1836, adopted by Prussia in 1841, and would serve as their standard military rifle for 30 years, undergoing constant tweaking and improvements. By 1871, however, the days of the needle fire were coming to a rapid end, as it was re...

Adopted by Bavaria in 1869, Johann-Ludwig Werder’s breechloading rifle was a brilliant piece of engineering, offering an automatically ejecting falling-block system with a remarkably high effective rate of fire and a wonderfully modular system of parts. Removing a single screw releases the entire...

The Ultimax light machine gun was developed by James Sullivan for the Singaporean military, and it is the first mass-production machine gun to be designed with the "constant recoil" system in which the bolt never impacts the rear of the receiver and the recoil impulse is felt as a continuous push...

Today I am speaking with retired Master Sergeant John Keene, who is the NFA specialist for the Morphy's. Specifically, we are discussing the terminology and categories of legal machine guns in the United States. From the very common misconception of a "Class III License" (which does not exist), t...

During World War One, the Ottoman Empire would join the war on the side of the Central Powers, in part because of a decision by the British Navy to seize a pair of battleships under construction for the Ottomans in the UK. This also caused the Ottoman military to adopt the 1909 Maxim as their sta...

The “cone hammer” was the first commercial version of the Mauser C96, so named for the stepped conical sides of its hammer. The C96 did not sell particularly well in the first few years after its introduction, and the only major bulk sale was to Sultan Abdul Hamid II of the Ottoman Empire, who bo...

The Striker shotgun was designed by a Rhodesian named Hilton Walker in the late 1970s, although not manufactured until after he had emigrated to South Africa. He partnered with the owner of the Armsel company to finance production, which was actually done by a company called Aserma Manufacturing....

Courtesy of the Morphy Auction Company, I am out at the range today with a very rare Italian Villar Perosa machine gun from World War One. These are pretty unorthodox machine guns, as they were initially designed as aircraft armament and later repurposed as ground guns. The basic design is a pair...

The Marlin / United Defense US-42 submachine gun was not used by the American military, but it did see service in World War Two. Its 9mm chambering made it inconvenient for the US, but ideal for agencies like the OSS and SOE to drop to resistance organizations within occupied Europe. So, let's ta...

Made by Señor Osorio in Nicaragua, this is a .22 rimfire caliber machine pistol with several clever design elements. It fires from an open bolt, using a .22-round Italian magazine of indeterminate origin. It has a selective trigger, with the top firing in full automatic (sliding rearward) and the...

The MP40/I was an experimental modification of the MP-40 submachine gun developed by the Erma company (we think) in late 1942. It was presumably developed in response to complaints of Soviet fire superiority with SMGs because of their large drum magazines (and also the larger number of SMGs used ...

After yesterday's history and disassembly, I had a chance to take the Hyde/Marlin M2 submachine gun out to the range today for some test firing. It is a remarkably nice gun to use - with a good in-line stock design and low rate of fire, it was extremely controllable. Better than both the Thompson...

The United States went into World War Two with the Thompsons submachine gun - a weapon far too heavy and too expensive for its role. The British went to the other extreme with the Sten and while the US did not want a gun quite that crude, the Sten did spur a desire for something cheaper than the ...

Before and during World War Two, the Japanese used a variety of training rifles and machine guns in both formal military instruction and technical schools to teach basic military drill. These guns were used for teaching basic drill skills, and were built to use wooden-bullet blank ammunition inst...

The Deer Gun is a covert CIA pistol inspired by the Liberator. In fact, the initial desire was to pull Liberators out of storage to use in the 1950s, but out was found that they had all been scrapped in 1947/8. So instead, a new gun was designed with the same criteria of simplicity and low cost. ...

Yesterday we looked at the short-lived Bernardelli VB submachine gun made a few years after World War 2, and compared it to the post-war Beretta Model 4 SMG. Having seen how different the two guns really are, it's time to take them to the shooting range and see how they compare in actual firing...

The Bernardelli company, known mostly for sporting arms, made an effort to break into the law enforcement/military/security market in the year after World War Two. This Model UB submachine gun was manufactured in 1948 and 1949, with a total of about 500 made. While it looks like a copy of the Ber...