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...

The Varan pistol was developed by two Rhodesian designers, Tony Blackshaw and Stewart Beecham, and was originally designated the PMX-80. Development would take nearly a full decade, however, and mostly took place in South Africa. The goal was simply to create a good domestic service handgun, as s...

This Luger has seen basically all of 20th century German history. It began as a 1917 production DWM pistol, used in World War One. After the war, it was one of the guns remarks for use by the police and military of the Weimar Republic, and at some point in this period had a special police safety ...

During the process of developing the pistol which would become the German army's P38, the Walther company was also interested in potential export contracts (like the one they actually did get from Sweden). One potential contract briefly explored was to the United States, and a few prototype MP pi...

The Colt Woodsman, introduced in 1915, was the premier - and really the only serious - option for the competitive target shooter into the 1920s when the Walther company decided to introduce a competitor. Walther needed a product to bring business, of course, and the Versailles treaty prohibited i...

The Astra 300 was introduced in 1923, copying the layout, mechanics, and handling of the Astra 400 military pistol in a much more convenient pocket size. It was made in both .32 ACP (7.65mm Browning) and .380 (9mm Kurz), with a magazine capacity of 7 and 6 rounds respectively. More than 150,000 w...

When Germany acquired a land border with Spain after the French capitulation in 1940, they took advantage of the opportunity to purchase Spanish firearms, and have them delivered across the French border to the town of Hendaye. A German inspection office was set up there for use with both Spanish...

The Automag series of pistol introduced by Arcadia Machine & Tool in the late 1980s and early 1990s were produced by the same man as the original Auto Mag Pistol - Harry Sanford - but they share nothing mechanical with that first generation gun. The later Automags (note the single word spelling, ...

Introduced in 1997, the CZ-97B is a .45ACP caliber addition to CZ’s line of globally popular handguns. However, the 97 has some substantial mechanical differences from the CZ-75 line. Most significantly, it locks on the front of the chamber and the ejection port instead of having locking lugs cut...

Colt introduced the Delta Elite in 1987 to take advantage of the hype and publicity surrounding the 10mm Auto cartridge in the Bren Ten pistol. When the Bren Ten became such an ignominious failure, it left Colt in an excellent position as one of the first companies to actually have a viable offer...

In 1993, Olympic Arms introduced an AR-15 with a side folding stock, as well as a stockless - and buffer-tube-less - pistol version. They did this by relocating the recoil spring of the AR to a tube running above the barrel and receiver. It was a clever modification (although the execution left s...

Star entered the Wondernine era in 1978 with their Model 28 pistol, a double action 9mm offering with 15-round magazines. It was one of the entrants in the first round of US military XM-9 trials, but unfortunately for Star was beat out by the Beretta 92. Star took feedback on its gun from the com...

The Lahti L-35 pistol was adopted by the Finnish military with the intention of it replacing the Luger, although production was never great enough to accomplish that goal. Early in its production, a couple of special target models were made for field shooting use, and this is one of them (serial ...

Another pair of transitional Bergmann transitional prototypes today, this time ones that sit between the 1896 and 1897 designs (No2/3/4 and No5). One of these is basically an 1896 frame with an 1897 upper assembly and locking system, while the other is basically an 1896 action with an 1897 grip f...

Today we have a pair of interesting transitional Bergman factory prototypes which fall between the early No.1 / 1894 design and the 1896 No2/3/4 commercial production guns. These are both in the white, and show features from the designs both before and after. An interesting look inside the develo...

The Bergmann #5 was the first pistol in the Bergmann line to have a locked breech action, taken from one of Schmeisser's machine gun patents. This model was introduced in 1897 using a more powerful cartridge than any of the previous Bergmanns, with the intention of finding military contracts. The...

Of the three calibers available in the 1896 model Bergmann pistol, the 6.5mm No.3 was the most popular. Approximately 4,000 of these guns were produced, and they found a worldwide following. The No.3 pistol was pretty much identical in concept to the 5mm No.2 Bergmann, but scaled up for the sligh...

The No.2 was Bergmann's first offering of a civilian pocket pistol, introduced in 1896 alongside the larger-framed No.3 and No.4 pistols. It was chambered for a truly anemic 5mm cartridge, using a simple blowback system simplified from the first Bergmann-Schmeisser design. It used a 5-round Mannl...