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...

During World War II, the US military had a simultaneous need to put machine guns into combat service, and also a need to train new soldiers on the operation of those machine guns. Cutting up existing guns to make demonstration models reduced the number available for field use, and the solution wa...

With the British military's return to Afghanistan in the Global War on Terror, it was found that the very long engagement ranges made it necessary to have a 7.62mm designated marksman's rifle, in addition to the 5.56mm scoped rifles in service. This was not unique to the British military; the US ...

The Thorneycroft was the first military bullpup rifle, developed in the United Kingdom in response to combat experiences in the second Boer War showing the British infantry rifles to be overly long and cumbersome. Scotsman James Baird Thorneycroft figured he could address this by moving the actio...

The Tankgewehr antitank rifle was developed by the Mauser company and adopted by the Imperial German military as an emergency measure to counter the introduction of tanks to the WW1 battlefield. The question is, did they really work? Could a 13.2mm AP bullet from a Tankgewehr really perforate the...

When the Swedish military decided that 1937 seemed like a pretty good time to be getting some new submachine guns, they arranged to purchase a version of the m/31 Suomi from their Finnish neighbors - which they called the M-37. Since the standard Swedish military pistol (the Husqvarna m/07) was c...

Designed by Finland's most notable arms inventor, Aimo Lahti, the m/31 Suomi submachine gun is an iconic weapon of the Winter War and the Continuation War. It is a first-generation submachine gun with a heavy milled receiver and very well-fitted parts - enough so that a series of vent holes were ...

Collector Grade is known for being a premiere publisher of technical firearms reference books, and I would be willing to argue that "Sturmgewehr!" by Hans-Dieter Handrich is the best book they have yet printed. The book was originally printed inn 2004, and by the time I started looking for a copy...

The origins of flap-locking (as used in the G41(W), G43, DShK, DP, and RPD, among others) goes back to a Swedish Lieutenant Friberg in 1870, who patented the system. At that time, however, the fouling endemic to black powder made self-loading firearms effectively impossible and so the concept wou...

I get a lot of questions about the purpose of stacking rods and stacking swivels on rifles - so let's see if we can clear some of them up today.

The SS41 was a bullpup, bolt action antitank rifle manufactured in small numbers by CZ for the SS. contrary to common assumption, the SS were not a part of the standard German military arms procurement system, and were forced to scrounge for their weapons from other sources. Czech factories were ...

The Model 1941 Sosso is a huge Italian experimental semiauto pistol designed by Giulio Sosso. It uses a short recoil locking mechanism and is chambered for standard 9x19mm Parabellum ammunition, but its more unusual feature is its magazine. Instead of using a traditional spring and follower, the ...

In the US, the commonly accessible version of the vz.61 Skorpion is the stock-less semiauto pistol - and in that configuration the gun is really nothing like the intentions of its designers. The Skorpion was designed to be a personal defense weapons, and in the small .32ACP caliber that really re...

The Czech vz.61 Skorpion is a rather unusual sort of firearm; a machine pistol designed from scratch instead of being converted from an existing handgun design, and chambered for the seemingly out of place .32ACP (7.65mm Browning) cartridge. It is a weapon which seems awkwardly small as a shoulde...

The SIG 310, aka MP48, is the final evolution of SIG's submachine gun design from the 1920s. It began as the MKM/P/S/O with a folding magazine well, wooden stock, and fancy lever-delayed operating system. Over almost 30 years of development, the wood stock and the lever-delayed system fell away, ...

The year in review with shooting! In order of appearance:

EM-2 (.280/30)
vz61 Skrpion
kp/44
kp/31 Suomi
ZB-26
RK-95/S
American 180
Finnish Maxim
KVKK-62
DP-28
Prototype Friberg/Kjellman
SIG MP48
Dreyse light rifle
PSM
RSC-1918
RSC-1917
Norinco M-305A
Yugo M84 (PKM)
Trejo Mode...

Andreas Schwarzlose was a German designer who created several very interesting and unusual handgun designs (in addition to his 1907 heavy machine gun, which was adopted as a standard arm of the Austro-Hungarian military). His first handgun was the model 1898, a short recoil, rotating bolt pistol ...