Luger collecting is one of the most detail-oriented and tricky niches in the whole firearms community - the amount of knowledge that has been documented is staggering, and the level of obsession with Lugers has led to lots of people chasing a small number of rare examples. And what do you get whe...

During World War Two, the Canadian government set up a loan program to help Chinese companies provide all manner of material aid to Canada’s allies. Among many others, one recipient of this aid was the Nationalist Chinese government under Chiang Kai Shek. Chinese representatives asked the John In...

In Lethal Weapon IV, Jet Li's character is caught at gunpoint by Mel Gibson's character...until he turns the tables by stripping the slide right off Gibson's Beretta 92FS. I wonder how feasible that really is? Also, I wonder if perhaps Jet Li's character was not the first to do it...?

The North China Type 19 pistol (not to be confused with the North China Type 19 rifle) is an improvement on the Type 14 Nambu pistol design which was manufactured in very small numbers in Japanese-occupied China late in World War Two. With shipping connections between Japanese troops in China and...

Next up in our Maserati-or-Hilux assessment of the Laugo Alien, we have a sand test. First a plain, easy sandy soil immersion, and then a horrible bucket of moon dust. So...will it blend?

The Laugo Alien is a pistol developed recently, and only introduced in 2018. Its lead designer was Ján Lučansky, who was also heavy involved in the CZ Scorpion carbine/SMG. The Alien is a significantly different take on modern handgun design than what we are used to seeing. It uses a fixed barrel...

Today we are taking the Laugo Alien out to the range - let's see if the hype is real!

Star introduced the Model A as the commercial sale version of the Model 1920 and 1921 pistols which they had entered into Spanish military trials in 1920. The pistol was rejected by the Army in favor of the Astra 400, but the Spanish Guardia Civil adopted it as their standard sidearm. The origina...

In the latter stages of World War One, the German military was looking for new arms for its Sturmtruppen. Without a reliable self-loading rifle design to use, they instead focused on pistil caliber arms. The first to be used was the existing lP08 artillery Luger, fitted with a drum magazine. At t...

The Model 700 Special was an attempt by Astra to piggyback on the popularity of the FN Model 1910 automatic pistol. Astra took their Model 100 (a renamed Ruby pistol of WWI lineage) and changed the styling to resemble the FN gun, including adding a rotating mainspring cap around the barrel, as th...

The PSM is a Soviet pistol from the late 1970s which has gotten itself quite the fanciful reputation here in the US, thanks to extreme rarity and some imaginative magazine articles. Common lore would have you believe that the PSM and its 5.45x18mm bottlenecked cartridge is capable of astounding f...

Following up on yesterday's history and disassembly of the PSM, today we are taking it out to the range for some shooting. In addition, wehave some generic Level IIIA soft body armor to test. We will see if the vaunted PSM can do better than the 7.62x25mm Tokarev - another Soviet handgun widely r...

The Nambu Automatic Pistol Type B, or “Baby Nambu” as it is known in US collecting circles, is a scaled-down companion to the 1902 “Grandpa” Nambu pistol. It was intended as a private purchase option for officers who needed to carry a sidearm, but did not want or need a full size service pistol. ...

One of the handguns that resulted from the post-WW2 interest in standardizing arms among the future members of NATO was a lightweight version of the Canadian produced Browning High Power. Experiments began in 1947 to create first a lightened slide by milling out unnecessary material, and then add...

The Arsenal 2011 began as a manufacturing proof of concept, to showcase the technical ability of the company making it (their prior experience was largely in exquisite miniature firearms). It was introduced to the public at SHOT Show a few years ago, and garnered more purchases than had been anti...

When Denmark decided to replace its M1910/21 Bergmann service pistols, it did not have to look far for a very high-quality option. The Swiss military was just concluding several years of handgun trials that had culminated in the SIG P210. This was an extremely well-made weapon, arguably the highe...

Developed in the early 1980s by Perry Arnett, the LAR Grizzly was manufactured from 1983 until 1998. It was an expensive gun (base price was $675 in 1985), a huge gun (48oz / 1.36kg), and a powerful gun - its .45 Winchester Magnum cartridge throws a 230 grain bullet at 1450 feet/sec (15g @ 450 m/...

The PA MAC 1950 (Pistolet Automatique Modele 1950) was the result of a 1946 French effort to standardize on a single military pistol. By the end of WWII, the French military had accumulated a mess of different pistols of French, Spanish, American, and German origin; officially using the Luger, P3...

Following up on yesterday's discussion of the history and mechanics of the French Pistolet Automatique Modele 1950, today I am running it in a run-n-gun pistol match.

The gun worked well for me, not having any malfunctions, but did present a couple issues. One was hammer bite, and the other wa...

The Mannlicher Model 1894 was one of the first successful semiauto pistol designs, and used a very unusual blow forward action. Instead of having a moving slide, the bullet would actually pull the barrel forward when fired, cycling the action. The Model 1894 used a double action trigger and had a...

With the Model 1896 pistol, Ferdinand Mannlicher made an effort to improve the ballistics of his pistols and make them less awkward, by moving to a locked breech action and a bottlenecked higher velocity cartridge. The very first Model 1896 was a blowback, but this was almost immediately replaced...

The Model 1901 and 1905 automatic pistols were the final development of the Mannlicher system. In this iteration they used internal magazines, a straight walled 7.65mm cartridge, and a delayed blowback system in which the slide had to overcome a spring-loaded wedge before it could open.

The Mo...

Hiram Maxim is obviously best known for the Maxim Machine Gun, but he and (most significantly) his assistant Louis Silverman also dabbled in handgun design. It appears that the work was primarily Silverman's, done with the tacit support of the Maxim company. A followup version was made with more ...

Harald Sunngård was Norwegian inventor in the early years of the 20th century who noticed a common perceived weakness of automatic pistols: reloads under stress were often bungled by shooters, leaving them vulnerable to return fire without being able to shoot back. Doing the classic inventor thin...