The Vickers-Berthier MkIII was adopted by the Indian army in 1933, and served through World War Two and into the 1970s (at least). It is chambered for the standard .303 British cartridge, fires from an open bolt, and uses top-mounted 30-round magazines. I didn't know exactly what to expect when I...

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...

The Charlton automatic rifle is one of very, very few examples of a conversion from bolt action to self-loading rifle actually working reasonably well. Typically this sort of project founders in expense and unreliability. Charlton, however, was able to take his vision for providing the New Zealan...

Knights Armament introduced their "Assault Machine Gun" a couple years ago, and I had a chance to take both versions (5.56mm and 7.62mm) out to the range recently. The gun is the spiritual descendant of the Stoner 63, but is more directly mades on Eugene Stoner's Model 86 light machine gun. It ut...

When the Israeli Defense Forces tested the FN Minimi, they found it to be lacking in a few areas, and decided that they could develop a better SAW domestically. Developed in the 1980s, the result was the Negev. Like the Minimi, the Negev is a 5.56mm light machine gun that can feed from either bel...

The MG13 was an interim machine gun used by the German military in the 1930s until the MG34 was adopted and widely issued. The MG13 (so designated to allow a claim that it was a WW1 era design, not a new development by Rheinmetall in the 1920s) was a closed-bolt, magazine fed, short recoil, hamme...

In April 1940, the US Ordnance Department circulated a request for a new light machine gun to replace the Browning M1919A4. It was to be shorter and lighter than the Browning, and was not to be based on the Browning system (presumably the Department wanted to move on from the bulky and heavy 1919...

After yesterday's look at the history and mechanical details of the Israeli Negev LMG, today we are taking it out the the range.

It certainly is a very pleasant experience to shoot! The recoil is very light, although not as light as in a true constant-recoil system like the new Knight's LAMG. ...

Czechoslovakia adopted the 7.62x45mm cartridge after World War Two, introducing both a vz.52 rifle and vz.52 light machine gun using the round. It was about 200 fps faster than the Soviet standard 7.62x39mm. It was marginally more effective in the LMG, but not so much that the Czechs put up a big...

With the failure of the G30M and G30R to lead to any military orders (American or otherwise), the Winchester company took the advice of the Ordnance Department to scale the design up to an automatic rifle. The BAR had a number of known shortcomings in WWII, and the military was interested in repl...

Everyone knows, of course, that the Chauchat is the worst gun ever, and can't normally get through an entire magazine without malfunctioning. Well, let's try that out...and with an even worse culprit; an M1918 Chauchat made for the AEF in .30-06.

The M1915 CSRG, commonly called the Chauchat after its primary designer, has a reputation as the worst gun ever put into military service. That reputation, however, is not deserved. It was not a great weapon, but it was a very serviceable gun for its day. The French needed a light automatic rifle...

In the mid/late 1960s, Colt was manufacturing AR-15 rifles and wanted to supply light machine guns to go with them - so they developed the CMG-2 ("Colt's Machine Gun"). The CMG-2 competed against the Stoner 63 in trials for the Navy SEALs (among others), and narrowly lost out. It was a very well ...

The Madsen light machine gun is note-worthy for several reasons - it was the first military-issue light machine gun developed and it was successful enough to remain in production into the 1950s (long after every WWI-era machine gun was long out of production). It was also one of the most usual ma...

A friend of mine went to a local machine gun shoot recently, and came back with some footage of a pair of Bren guns being fired with a 100-round drum magazine. These drums were designed for anti-aircraft use, and are quite rare today, so it was cool to see one actually in use.

A close competitor to the famous Bren gun, The Vickers Berthier would ultimately lose out to its better known rival during the 1930s British Light Machine Gun trials. It would go on to see success with Indian troops during the Second World War.

We take a 1940 Bren gun to the range to demonstrate function, disassembly, and shooting from a variety of positions.

Today we have a British Hotchkiss Portative machine gun in .303 caliber to look at. These were used by everyone on the Allied side in WWI, and were a reliable and effective gun, if not the simplest design.

Today we have a video from a range session with a 1914 Lewis Gun in .303 British. We disassemble the gun and do some shooting. The Lewis was a staple light machine gun for the British Army in the First World War, and a pretty nice gun to shoot.

Our friend Joe had the opportunity not too long ago to take out a French Mle 1924/29 Chatellerault light machine gun for test firing. The 24/29 is a quite nice LMG that is definitely under-appreciated. As with several other very good guns, it gets an automatic poor reputation simply for being Fre...

The AMELI (which is a contraction of "ametralladora ligera", or light machine gun) was introduced by CETME in 1981, and adopted by the Spanish military as the MG82. It was a counterpart LMG to the new CETME-L 5.56mm rifles, and is a mechanically fascinating design.

The AMELI is a roller-delaye...

In 1961, Heckler & Koch introduced a new light machine gun based on their roller-delayed blowback system as a companion piece to the G3/HK91 rifle. While the German military was quite happy with its MG3 machine guns, H&K expected that other, smaller nations adopting the G3 would be interested in ...

I normally want to have something specific to demonstrate what I take a gun to the range, but today I don't. What I have today is and FN-D, the very best iteration of the Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) - and I just wanted an excuse to take it out to enjoy. Specifically, the is a Luxembourg contr...

In August 1913, the British War Office wrote to Sir Charles Ross requesting a sample automatic rifle for trials in the UK. Ross was able to submit a prototype on May 1914, which was tested at Enfield - but only fired 308 rounds before the test ended, suggesting that something important probably b...