The Portuguese Army purchased 5,000 7.65mm Luger pistols in 1908, and the Navy followed suit the next year - but the Navy opted for 9mm ones, with 100mm barrels. A contract for 350 was placed in November 1909, with the guns delivered in 1910. These were in a standalone serial number range startin...

Today we are going to take a looks at a series of six prototype Roth Theodorovic pistols. These were a design that competed in Austrian pistol trials around the turn of the century, and eventually lost out to the Roth Krnka (adopted as the Roth-Steyr M.7).

Today we are looking at a high-end C96 Mauser pattern sporting carbine made by the Tsingtao Ironworks. Only a few dozen of these were made, and this one survives in excellent condition. It is a good example of how some guns in Warlord China were made by skilled craftsmen with excellent tools and ...

Today we are looking at a second Chinese Warlord-Era C96 Mauser carbine. These were made as fancy sporting or presentation arms for important people - just as the original Mauser-made C96 carbines were. This example was made at the Taku Naval Dockyard, a facility initially set up to maintain the ...

Today I'm at SIG Sauer Parts (soon to be ModGuns) to play around with assembling a SIG 320. I've always been interested in stocked pistols, and so I'm going to take this opportunity to put together a USW (Universal Service Weapon). This originated as a complete pistol made by B&T (based on the CZ...

Star introduced their first compact tilting-barrel pistol (the Model D) in 1922. The Spanish military was interested in something along these lines, but the Model D was intended to be a civilian pocket-carry gun, and was just too small for military use. What was needed was something still compact...

Time for another practice session on the spinner...I am improving!

This time, I stopped trying to make double taps, and focused instead on getting a single properly timed hit at each presentation. Hitting twice is good, but not if it causes me to miss a following shot - perfect consistency is ...

When the Allies occupied German at the end of World War Two, the Walther factory at Zella Mehlis was initially garrisoned by American soldiers (who did a pretty thorough job liberating all the guns they could find there) but eventually ended up in the Soviet occupation zone (and later East German...

For this month's BackUp Gun Match, I decided to bring out the CZ38 - one of the top contenders for ugliest service pistol ever adopted. It's a single-stack, double-action-only .380 with a weirdly bulky grip, so it's not winning any ergonomic awards either...

Today I'm taking an original (made in 1918) Artillery Luger rig out to a 6-stage USPSA match. I'm entered in PCC (pistol-caliber carbine) division using the detachable shoulder stock (note that this is exempted from the NFA, so it does not need to be registered) and the snail drum magazine. Happi...

Historically speaking, the AutoMag 180 pistol has been a reaper of investors. Between 1971 and 1982, no fewer than six different companies went bankrupt trying to make a profit building Auto Mags. However, we may have finally reached the end of that streak...

In 2015, all the existing tools, par...

The Lange Pistole 08 (long pistol), or Artillery Luger as it is commonly known today, has an interesting history. It was originally developed as a personal defense weapon for German field artillery and air crews. While the foot artillery had been issued carbines, the field artillery were mounted ...

The SIG 320 was adopted by the US Army as its new M17 full-size service pistol, but that was only have of the Modular Handgun System. The other half was the M18, a compact version of the same pistol, with a 3.9" barrel (compared to the 4.7" barrel of the M17). The Army did also adopt the M18 for ...

My favorite pattern of domestic Chinese pistol form he Warlord Era is the one I have termed the "Luger Grip Type". The Luger was not a very common pistol in this period in China, and it is rare to see elements of it copied on Chinese designs. This pattern, however, very specifically uses the grip...

In the late 1980s, the Spanish gunmaker Star decided to join the new hot trend of 10mm semiauto pistols. The cartridge was getting a lot of press, and Star saw this as an opportunity too ride the wave and also the get a pistol on the market that would attract IPSC competitors. Unlike some compani...

At the end of the Great War, the United States sent several thousand soldiers to eastern Siberia, to protect war supplies from the Red Russian forces and to help rescue the Czechoslovak Legion. Also known as the Polar Bear Expedition, this force spent 1919 around Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok. They...

My friend Rhett Neumayer has been experimenting with an unorthodox but very interesting way to use handguns that don't have reciprocating slides. He fits a red dot optic on a relatively tall mount, then presses the back of the pistol into his cheek while gripping it over the top of the frame with...

One of the scarce, small-production manufacturers of the Luger is Krieghoff - Heinrich Krieghoff to be exact. Kreighoff Waffenfabrik was a smallish arms company that wanted to get into major contracts with the rearming German military in the 1930s. They began by bidding on a contract for 10,000 L...

Previously, I did a Totally Scientific (tm) comparison between Bruce Gray's personal SIG P220 Elite and a flock of six of Hi-Point's new 10mm JXP pistols. Today, I want to see how the two compare in a more practical test, so I brought them out to the monthly BackUp Gun Match.

Note 1: What I re...

Back in 1975, Beretta introduced a line of mid-size semiauto pistols. The Model 81 was in .32 ACP (intended for the European market) and the Model 84 was chambered for .380 ACP for Americans. These both used double-stack magazines, and single-stack versions followed a few years later (the 82 and ...

When Federal announced their new .30 Super Carry cartridge, I was really excited to see the rebirth of the 7.65mm French Long caliber. That round was originally developed for the Pedersen Device in late WW1, and then adopted by the French military for its 1935 pistols and MAS38 submachine gun. It...

Yesterday we looked at the history and the functioning of the Armatix iP1 "smart gun", and today I'm taking it out to a BackUp Gun Match. How will it perform? Will it cycle reliably? Will I time out before I can actually get it authorized to fire? Let's find out!

The Armatix iP1 is a pistol created by former H&K designer Ernst Mauch that was released - or almost released - in the US in late 2013 and early 2014. It is a .22LR caliber semiauto pistol that incorporates an RFID-connected authentication link between a watch and this pistol, so that the pistol ...

In firearms, as in really all technology, the market iterates and improves concepts over time. A novel new system - like the polymer-framed, striker-fired semiauto pistol - will never be perfect on its first introduction. Over time, as users and manufacturers gain more insight into the details of...