Walther Model 3: A Tiny Early .32
Germany
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8m 18s
Walther was founded as a rifle making company in the 1880s, and expanded into the flourishing market for semiautomatic pocket pistols around 1910. The Model 3 was the company’s first .32 ACP caliber pistol, and was a very small gun. With a 6-round capacity it offered one round more than the Pieper Bayard, the only smaller .32 available at the time. Compared to guns like the FN 1910, it was quite tiny indeed. Only about 3500 were produced between its introduction in 1913 and the end of WW1, and its production was massively superseded by the larger but otherwise very similar Model 4, which was ordered in significant quantity by the German military during the war. Walther development after WW1 would return to a focus on the .25 ACP cartridge.
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