The Menz Liliput is one of the smallest functional firearms ever put into mass production. It was offered in 4.25mm (.17 caliber) in addition to the more popular .25ACP and .32ACP. The 4.25mm cartridge is used generated about 17 foot pounds of muzzle energy - trivial by most pistol standards, but...

The FN Model 1903 was a Belgian-made scaled-up version of John Browning's model 1903 pocket hammerless pistol. The pocket hammerless was made in .32 ACP and .380 calibers for (primarily) the civilian market in the US by Colt, and the FN model was chambered for the more powerful 9x20mm Browning Lo...

The Adler is a unique little pocket pistol built in pre-WWI Germany.Not much is known about it, as only about a hundred were manufactured and they failed to be a commercial success. The design is a simple blowback one, using a proprietary 7.25mm cartridge. However, the disassembly method is prett...

The Bren Ten is an interesting story of handgun development and business failure. The gun was first developed by Dornaus & Dixon, with the consulting help of the iconic Col. Jeff Cooper. It was intended to be a handgun to improve upon the venerable 1911 in every way.

To satisfy the adherents ...

During World War One, Birmingham Small Arms (aka BSA) grew into a massive arms manufacturing facility to supply the previously inconceivable military appetite for rifles. When the war ended, they were left with a bit of a dilemma. As a private entity, what were they to do with such a huge product...

The Mannlicher 1894 is one of a small number of firearms designed with a blow-forward action, and also the first of these guns. It was the creation of Ferdinand Mannlicher, a brilliant and prolific Austria inventor who is also responsible for the en-bloc clip concept, very early experimental semi...

The JoLoAr pistol was a combination of a poor-selling and unremarkable Spanish blowback semiauto pistol called the Sharpshooter and an idea by a man named Jose Lopez Arnaiz (whose name is the source of the pistol's name). Arnaiz conceived the idea of mounting a lever (palanca in Spanish) onto a p...

The story of the .45ACP Lugers is a bit complex, and widely misunderstood. What most people believe is that two such guns were made for US military testing, one was lost, and the other is worth a million dollars. Well, that's virtually all incorrect. In actuality, probably about a half dozen were...

The Walther KPK was a modified version of the PPK automatic pistol made in very small numbers by Walther in hopes of winning a new military contract. Mechanically identical to the PPK, the KPK has a lengthened slide to effectively shroud the hammer, preventing it from catching or snagging on clot...

William John Whiting spent about 10 years trying to get the British military to adopt his automatic pistol, and finally achieved his goal in 1913 with a contract for pistols supplied to the British Royal Navy - only to have the expense of World War I wipe away all interest in self-loading pistols.

In my defense, I want to point out that the only reason I wanted to get one of these pistols was to see how much it actually resembled the Czech vz.61 Skorpion, wich is a very nice piece of machinery. And the answer is, the Armitage "Scarab" version is like the real Skorpion in basic profile only...

There are really no new ideas in firearms design today - some of the best and brightest engineers humanity has produced have spent the last 120+ years figuring out every possible mechanism for building self-loading firearms. What we have today in new guns are creative new ways to put together var...

BSA (Birmingham Small Arms) was the largest private arms maker in the UK during World War One, and when the war ended it of course saw its huge military contracts evaporate. One of BSA's efforts to develop new markets and product lines was to devise a series of self-loading pistols. These also in...

Last week, we talked a bit about obsolete firearms controls over at the ForgottenWeapons.com blog, and that discussion made me think of a fairly recent pistols with a fairly unique feature, the Browning BDM. Mechanically, the BDM is a pretty standard modern automatic pistol - it uses the ubiquito...

The CZ-52 really isn't a forgotten weapons yet, but it is a pretty interesting gun mechanically, and well worth taking a look at. About 200,000 of them were made in Czechoslovakia from 1952 to 1954, and they served as that country's standard military sidearm for several decades (which the rest of...

Early in the production of the C96 Mauser, the company tried a variety of different configurations of the pistol, to see what would be popular and sell well. Most of these were abandoned by about 1902, when the design was more or less standardized to the version were are familiar with today. One ...

When we think about roller-delayed blowback firearms, we generally think of H&K rifles - but H&K also made a miniature version of the system for the P9 pistol in the late 1960s. The P9 was made as a single-stack design in both 9mm and .45ACP, along with a target version (with adjustable sights) a...

I recently had the chance to hit the range with a VP-70Z, the semiauto civilian version of H&K's 1970 machine pistol. It is notable both for being one of the few production machine pistols around (and it would only fire automatically when its optional buttstock was attached), but also for being t...

The Semmerling LM4 has pretty much no historical significance, but it does have a pretty unusual operating system. It is a .45ACP backup pistol developed by a fellow named Philip R. Lichtman in the 1970s. It was a pretty compact pistol, intended as a last-ditch backup weapon while still being in ...

We had the chance to dig into a Roth Steyr 1907 selfloading pistol recently, and put together a video on it. The pistol is quite unusual, with a fixed internal magazine, rotating barrel locking system, and quasi-double action trigger mechanism (actually quite similar to modern striker-fire pistol...

In the first years of the 20th century, the US military was looking for a new standard sidearm in a .45-caliber cartridge, and set up a series of trials to choose one. The entrants to the 1907 pistol trials included many of the prominent semiauto pistols of the day, like the Parabellum (aka Luger...

This particular 1902-made example of the C96 Mauser incorporates several experimental features of the design that would never go into mass production. It was an effort to make a version of the C96 that would be more suitable for civilian carry - something a bit lighter and more compact than the m...

We previously got to take a look at a Hino-Komuro, a Japanese blow-forward automatic pistol dating from 1908 - and today we have another blow-forward from 1908. Andreas Schwarzlose (best known for his 1907 and 07/12 machine guns) designed this pistol for military and civilian use, and it saw mino...

I've been promising this range video for a while now, and here it is. We took all three configurations of the C96 Broomhandle Mauser - a pistol, a carbine, and a machine pistol - out to the range for some comparisons.