Canada was the first country to formally adopt the FN FAL as its standard service rifle, and in 1958 it added the C2 light machine gun version of the FAL to its arsenal. The C2, later updated to C2A1, was a heavy-barreled version of the regular FAL rifle. It shared all the same basic action compo...

Canada was the first country to adopt the FAL rifle, purchasing trials rifles from FN within weeks of the formal standardization of the 7.62mm NATO cartridge. Canada acquired production rights to the rifle along with the technical package form FN, and spent 18 months converting the drawings into ...

Andries Piek was a farmer in South Africa in the late 1970s when he mail ordered an LDP 9mm carbine from Rhodesia. The gun was impounded by South African customs, and Piek wound up designing modifications to the gun to meet South African laws. He was contracted to do this to all the LDPs sent to ...

The South African company Smith and Beecham was not a large operation, and their most notable product was a .380 caliber compact pistol, of which not more than 2000 were ever made (it was not a success). Experimentally, the company also developed a polymer frame for the Browning High Power, howev...

This didn't come out as well as I was hoping (one of the stage videos got corrupted and the others don't show the shooting stages as well as I'd anticipated), but I will do better in future work. The gun, on the other hand, performed much better than I was expecting!

The Star Model 1914 was a ...

Update: I came in 3rd place of 33 competitors, with a total score of 71.

Today I am shooting a Colt 1908 originally issued to the Shanghai Municipal Police in 1925. The gun was chosen for issue by William Fairbairn, who is best known for training OSS and SOE operatives in hand-to-hand combat t...

The last batch of Mauser K98k rifles made by Brno after World War Two was a run in 1950 for East German border guards. These rifles have receivers marked “tgf 1950” in a style just like the wartime German arsenal codes, but where the codes were random letters, this one stands for “Tschekoslovakis...

Rob Kassab and Brad Dunbar have just published an excellent new book on the Winchester Model 1895 rifle - the Last of the Classic Lever Actions, as their subtitle describes. It is a very nice looking and feeling book (US-printed, leather-bound, and 432 pages long), it is chock full of good photog...

The latest Vickers Guide book is now available: WWII Germany, Volume 2. Where the first volume focused on bolt action rifles and submachine guns, this second volume has the really cool stuff: semiauto and select-fire rifles, machine guns, and last-ditch arms. It also includes a section on present...

Fair disclaimer: I may be biased, as I am a co-author of this work...

Vickers Guide is back with the second volume on the AK, specifically on 5.45mm and 5.56mm Kalashnikovs. If you like the first volume, you will definitely like this one - it was led by Larry Vickers with myself and Rob Stott ...

This is no ordinary firearms reference book. This is a 900-page, nearly 12 pound tome in Italian. And not justify Italian; hand-written cursive Italian. With a substantial number of hand-painted illustrations. It is about the history of the Terni Arsenal and its products, from the needlefire Carc...

The pinfire system, as invented by Casimir Lefaucheux and expanded by his son Eugene, is one of the most significant corners of cartridge firearms development that has been thoroughly overlooked by collectors and firearms enthusiasts. This was probably the most widespread and relevant cartridge p...

This new book from Mowbray is an English translation of a work originally written in Spanish by Fernando de Aguinaga and Jose Luis de Aguinaga, which clearly involved a tremendous amount of original research. The full title is "Spanish Rolling Block: The Basque Made Rifles of the Third Carlist Wa...

"Weapon Mounts for Secondary Armament" is a nearly 1200-page reference on all manner of machine gun mounting systems for tanks, aircraft,t light vehicles, and ground mounts. The book was commissioned in 1957 by the Detroit Arsenal as a reference for engineers tasked with designing the secondary w...

The Royal North West Mounted Police (later merged with the Dominion Police to become the RCMP - Royal Canadian Mounted Police) are an interesting and often overlooked element of the western frontier. We Americans tend to only think about the Old West up to northern Montana and Idaho, but of cours...

Robert Segel, long-time editor of Small Arms Review magazine, has just published a book on machine gun accessories and equipment, and it's a very valuable new piece of reference material for the community. Mr. Segel has long been a machine gun collector, and has paid particular attention to acces...

One of the perennial challenges facing authors of firearms reference books is balancing the very technical nit-pickery with the broad historical view of a gun and its context in world events. The emphasis is usually tending towards the technical, but Neil Alpinshaw has done an excellent job of ba...

The M14 rifle is a rather controversial arm in American military service. As Frank Iannamico's title says, it was the last steel-and-wood infantry rifle to be adopted by the US military, and it has a great many very loyal and dedicated fans. At the same time, it had the shortest production span o...

I have had several people ask if I might write a book on the development of German military rifles in the same format as my book on French rifles. I do not plan to, in large part because there is a lot of literature on the subject already published in English. In particular, Hans Dieter Gotz' boo...

Having recently finished guiding a WW1 battlefield tour in France and Belgium, I found myself curious to learn more about the details of French tank development and service. We are used to seeing and hearing about the British tanks, but it was actually the French Renault FT-17 light tank that wou...

John C. Simpson has been teaching military and police sniper training since 1985 - nearly as long as I have been alive. I encountered him back when I filmed a video on a Confederate Whitworth sniper, and he helped me correct my explanation of how the British were measuring rifle accuracy and prec...

I have been impatiently awaiting the expanded second edition of Wayne Johnson’s “The FN-49: The Last Elegant Old-World Military Rifle” ever since I heard a rumor that it was in the works. The first edition was printed in 2004, and sold out before I started looking for a copy. There was also a Col...

Norm Flayderman opened an antique gun shop in 1952, and a few years later expanded his marketing to a mail-order catalog. He would ultimately print 119 such catalogs by 1998, researching and documenting a tremendous amount of information on antique American firearms. In 1977 he published the firs...

Chas Lotter was 22 when, in 1971, he enlisted as a field medic in the Rhodesian Army. He served until 1980, leaving as a Sergeant and emigrating to South Africa. His book, "Echoes of an African War" is a collection of poetry he wrote throughout his military service and in the years after. It show...