This is a very rare style of Japanese matchlock, with three separate barrels on a revolving axis. It has all the design and decorative elements of a tanegashima musket, but built more as a self-defense piece for home or perhaps when traveling by palanquin. Think of it like the Edo-period Japanese...

The Welrod was a program to develop a silent assassination pistol for British SOE (Special Operations Executive) late in 1942. It needed to be chambered in the .32 ACP cartridge, be effective to a range of 15m, and have its firing not recognizable as a firearm at 50m distance. The project was led...

I had the chance to take a .32ACP Welrod MkII out to the range for a bit of shooting. These use a combination of baffles and rubber wipes, and the suppressor's effectiveness quickly drops from "fantastic" to merely "very good" after a few shots put a hole in the front wipe. This example already h...

The mid-nineteenth century saw huge strides in the development of repeater pistol mechanisms, with the introduction of the Colt Paterson revolver in 1836. Other excellent designs would follow in the ensuing decades. But, as we'll discover with the Jones, weapons designers continued to deviate fro...

This week, Jonathan is joined by a quintessential What is this Weapon firearm. Designed early in the 20th-century, this self defense pistol still incorporates a hammer ignition system, while being locked in place by something resembling a bolt-action system.

The unreliability and issues with reload associated with new pistols in British service like the Enfield Marks I & II meant many officers preferred the large calibre Lancaster for a sidearm.

Described by Jonathan as an 18th century Winchester repeater, this Lorenzoni repeater pistol combines intricate craftmanship with an ingenious mechanism for reloading on the fly. Join our Keeper of Firearms and Artillery as he delves into how this remarkable weapon functions, but also who would h...

Please support us at: https://www.patreon.com/capandball The Holt's booth is one of the best places to spend your time at the IWA show. The well known auction house had some very interesting guns on display including a Porter turret rifle, Volcanic pistol and carbine, and English civil war flintl...

Patented in 1896, this is one of several models of unique pocket pistols designed by Paul Brun-Latrige. He was a manager of the Manufrance company located in St. Etienne France, a large mail-order catalog company that produced a wide variety of products. Early versions of this pistol used a ring ...

The Welrod is a nearly completely silent bolt action pistol designed by SOE Section 9 for covert operation and assassination use during WW2. Chambered for the .32ACP cartridge (which is subsonic to begin with), the Welrod uses a ventilated barrel and large-volume suppressor with several solid rub...

Josef Laumann was an Austrian designer of early ring-trigger manually repeating pistols, and was one of the first to develop that type of handgun into a semiautomatic. He took an 1891 pattern ring trigger gun and adapted it with an 1892 patent into a simple blowback self-loader - coming very clos...

William Marston was born in the UK in 1822 and emigrated to the US in the 1830s with his father, who was a gun smith. William became a naturalized citizen in 1843, and in 1844 went to work for his father in the family business. He would later open his own shop, and became successful making a wide...

Emile and Leon Nagant set up their manufacturing company in Liege, Belgium in 1859, and it would become one of the most prominent in the city. The brothers worked with a variety of other patent holders, including striking a deal with the Remington company. This would lead to Nagant production of ...

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The Gaulois (Gallic) was a compact squeeze-type palm pistol made by the Manufrance concern in St. Etienne in the 1890s. It held 5 rounds of 8mm ammunition (similar to the .32 Extra-Short used in other types of palm pistols) and was fired by squeezing the rear grip into the body of the gun.

As ...

Charles Lancaster was a master London gunsmith who made 2-barrel and 4-barrel pistols in a variety of British revolver cartridges (commonly known as Howdah pistols). Many of his pistols was purchased privately by British military officers, explorers, and big-game hunters to use as backup weapons ...

There is a fair amount of debate as to whether these are authentic WWII German artifacts, as opposed to post-war creations to feed the market for Nazi memorabilia. Authentic or not, they are a very neat mechanism to take a look at.

The Bär pistol was designed as a compact gentleman’s defensive arm with a number of interesting features. These include twin barrels and a “cylinder” or chamber block, which held 4 cartridges in a single column, thus giving the pistol a smooth-sided shape easy to conceal while also giving it doub...

Colette was a Belgian gun manufacturer that made this interesting parlor pistol. It used a rocketball type of cartridge, in which the powder and primer were encased in the hollow base of the bullet to make a caseless cartridge. The gravity pistol was named for its gravity feed mechanism and its 2...

This palm-squeezer type pistol was designed by Catello Tribuzio (sometimes spelled Trabuzio) of Turin around 1890. It is a very simple design, including a clever dual purpose ejector that also acts as the sear for firing. This example has a 7.65mm bore, although sometimes these are described as 8...

What we today call the Collette Gravity Gun was actually designed by a gunsmith named Jean Nicolas Herman in Liege between 1850 and 1854. He was an employee of Victor Collette (note: spellings vary), and licensed his patent for Collette to produce. The system was first shown at the 1855 Paris Int...

The typical pepperbox revolver is a sleek and small .31 caliber double action pocket gun, like the Allen & Thurber standard type. This one, however, is anything but typical. This London-made gun is a far larger than normal, and sports 8 barrels, with a center square of four and an addition four o...

I have previously done some video on the 1893 Bittner manually repeating pistol, but I have not had one of the original clips for them before. So, that's what we're going to take a quick look at today!