First patented in 1859 and sold as a sporting rifle before the Civil War (in calibers 32, 38, and 41 rimfire), Frank Wesson added a military model with a 24 inch barrel and chambered for .44 Rimfire. His carbine was simple and efficient - although too simple and efficient for most troops to like....

Finland found itself with nearly 200,000 Mosin Nagant rifles in its possession after breaking away from Russian rule in 1917, and those rifles would for the basis of Finnish infantry arms until the adopted of a semiautomatic rifle many decades later.

At first, Russian rifles were simply refurb...

Given the status of the AR15 as the preeminent military rifle still today, it comes as a surprise to many people to learn just how old the gun really is. Civilian production of the SP-1 model by Colt actually began in 1964, which means that early SP-1 rifles started becoming Curio & Relic qualifi...

The Ching Sling is an answer to the question, "how can one have a sling that is both a useful shooting aid and also quick to get in and out of?" The formal shooting sling was a part of US military training for many decades, and is still a staple of long range marksmanship competition. However, it...

The Army Cadet Force is a British quasi-military organization that acts general as a precursor to military enlistment. With the adoption of the L85A1 as the British service rifle, a manually operated copy was also developed for use by Cadets. Designated the L98A1, this rifle was built without a g...

This is a very rare Ross automatic pistol, patented in 1903 by Charles Ross, of the Ross Rifle Company in Quebec. It is a short recoil, toggle locked design, made for the .45 Ross proprietary cartridge (although efforts were made, unsuccessfully, to make a .45 ACP version for the US 1907 pistol t...

If you starting looking carefully at military bolt action rifles, you will find that they generally all fall into one of three categories:

Rifles: 30-32 inches / 760-810mm
Short Rifles: 24-26 inches / 610-660mm
Carbines: 17-20 inches / 430-510mm

How did these different standard lengths co...

The United States first experimented with a combination trowel and bayonet in 1868, producing 200 experimental examples made from standard socket bayonets. This was immediately followed by an additional 500 Model 1869 trowel bayonets made new. These were distributed to a few companies of the infa...

The Cameron-Yaggi conversion was an experimental American trench rifle that was never put into service. However, this one example has survived, and today we are going to put a few rounds through it.

The literature says that recoil is mild, and the periscope actually moves away form the shooter...

J.P. Lindsay was a former Springfield Armory employee when he designed and patented an idea for a two-shot, single-barrel pistol. The apocryphal story is that Lindsay's brother was killed in a firefight against two Indians, while reloading his single-shot rifle - so Lindsay was moved to design a ...

James Greene patented this unusual breechloading carbine design in 1854, and arranged to have it manufactured by the Massachusetts Arms Company of Chicopee Falls. He managed to sell 300 of them to the US military, in .54 caliber and with 22 inch barrels. Field testing was done in 1857, although i...

The largest sporting rifles ever actually used in the field as more than an exhibition were 4-bore stopping rifles, firing roughly 1" in diameter (25mm) projectiles. These were intended to not simply kill a dangerous animal, but to stop it immediately in a charge, which might require shooting thr...

The Warner Arms Company was formed in (or around) 1911 to import and sell Schwarzlose 1908 blow forward pistols in the United States. It was run by Franklin Warner, who also operated a sporting goods store (Kirtland Sporting Goods) in New York, and thus had a ready retail outlet for imported pist...

When Sweden decided to replace its Remington Rolling Block rifles with a more modern repeating rifle design, they tested models from Mauser, Mannlicher, Lee, and Krag. The Mauser 1893 was chosen as the winner of the competition, with a few modifications (most notably a change to allow the safety ...

The effort to create a .22 rimfire training and competition version of the 1903 Springfield rifle began just after World War One, as a project of the esteemed then-Major Julian Hatcher. His work would result in the M1922 rifle, of which about 2000 were made. However, the design would go through s...

The Rogak P18 was a copy of the Steyr GB service pistol, with some disagreement over whether it was unlicensed or just unfortunately made. Les Rogak was a Steyr distributor in Illinois who managed to acquire a set of plans for the GB pistol, and put it into production before Steyr-made examples w...

The AR-15 does not lend itself to stock-less use, because its basic design places the recoil spring in the length of the stock, and requires that space for the bolt carrier to travel in. Olympic Arms, however, developed a way to modify the basic AR-15 design to allow for a pistol version that did...

Jeff Cooper was an icon of the American firearms community, best known for his work with the Southwest Pistol League and father of modern practical handgun competition. Cooper was a Marine Corps veteran and avid hunter in addition, and in the mid 1980s he began to codify a concept he would call t...

At the end of When Germany capitulated in 1945, there were nearly 400,000 German soldiers in Norway (largely thanks to the efforts of the Norwegian Resistance to prevent them from being transferred south). This provided Norway with a massive supply of K98k Mauser rifles to reequip their armed for...

As World War Two expanded to encompass the whole US economy, it became clear to the Army that some cost cutting measures would be required. One place that was a clear choice was in rimfire .22 caliber training rifles. Since the 1920s, the US had used training and competition rifles from Springfie...

Among the many Swedish Mauser carbines imported into the United States is an interesting batch of guns marked "InterArms G33/50". What are these actually?

They are rifles imported by InterArms, of course, and they began life as proper Swedish m/94 and m/94-14 carbines. Upon import, though, the...

Imported into the US through the appropriately-named Navy Arms company, this is a Greener Martini action built into a "Light Harpoon Gun" by Webley & Scott in the UK. These were built as legitimate hunting arms, although they are far better known today for the appearance of one in the movie Jaws....

The M17S began as an Australian design by a man named Alex Hand, apparently intended for Australian military trials. It did not succeed in that effort, although the Australian military did adopt a bullpup rifle (a version of the Steyr AUG). Instead, the company went in search of commercial sales....

One will sometimes encounter German WW1 arms - mostly Lugers and Kar98 carbines - that have two date stamps, one of them being 1920. What is the significance of this?

The crux of the matter is that the "1920" stamp is not a date, but rather a property mark. When the Treaty of Versailles was be...