Benelli is not the company we think of today for modern service pistols - and according to the sales record of the B76 family, they weren't in the 1980s either. Designed in the early 1970s and put into production in 1976, the Benelli B76 is very pretty single-stack service pistol, notable for bei...

The Benelli MP3S is a very rare pistol in .32 S&W, and a nearly unheard of one in 9mm Parabellum. Well, thanks to viewer Todd we have one of those 9mm examples to take to the range today - thanks, Todd! I figured it would be interesting to try it side by side with my standard Benelli B76 and see ...

The Bernardon-Martin was the first commercially viable semiautomatic pistol manufactured in France; a .32ACP (7.65mm Browning) striker-fired pocket pistol competing with the FN Browning 1899/1900. The first model was introduced in 1907 with a fixed magazine, which rather quickly was changed to a ...

If you ask Bond Arms, they will tell you that their Bullpup9 (previously the Boberg XR9S) gets multiple benefits from its unique operating mechanism. Most everyone familiar with the gun knows about the idea that it provides and extra cartridge-length worth of barrel for the same overall length as...

The South African company Smith and Beecham was not a large operation, and their most notable product was a .380 caliber compact pistol, of which not more than 2000 were ever made (it was not a success). Experimentally, the company also developed a polymer frame for the Browning High Power, howev...

Manufactured from 1899 until 1905, the Charola y Anitua pistols (later becoming just the Charola pistols) were basically scaled down C96 Mauser designs chambered for the 5mm Clement and 7mm Charola cartridges. They were briefly tested by the Spanish military, but not adopted and ultimately only s...

Designed by Witold Chylewski, this was only the second pistol manufactured by SIG (the first being the 6.5mm blow-forward 1894 MAnnlicher design). It was patented prior to WW1, but only after the war was Chylewski able to find a manufacturer interested in his gun. The most notable element of the ...

Juan Esperanza was one of the two partners who formed the Astra company (with Pedro Unceta). When the two had a falling-out in 1925 and parted ways, Esperanza formed his own company and went on something of a patenting binge. He made an unsuccessful attempt at designing a new machine gun for the ...

The m/44 pistol was intended to be a lower-cost replacement for the Lahti L35 pistol for the Finnish Defense Forces, but production delays resulted in the first batch of 25 examples not being completed until after the end of the Continuation War. Treaties limited Finland's right to conduct arms d...

When John Browning licensed his handgun patents, the North American rights were granted to Colt, and the Western European rights to FN in Belgium. Browning provided the patents and patent model guns to the companies, and they were then free to interpret the design however they thought best. In th...

The H&K Mk 23 pistol was developed in the 1990s for the US Special Operations Command and US Navy. The goal was to produce an "offensive handgun" that could serve as a primary armament for a special forces operator as well as a backup arm. It was required to be no more than 12 inches long, fit a ...

The MP5 is widely regarded as the best submachine gun ever made, and it has been widely copied. But only now has H&K released a semiauto civilian version of it in pistol form. Prior to the AWB, the HK94 was available as a semiauto carbine (with a 16" barrel), but that was prohibited in 1988. H&K ...

Eugene Golubtsov - aka Lugerman - has been building beautiful .45 ACP Lugers base don the original DWM technical data package for the 1907 trial Luger for a little while now. We previously looked at one of his standard guns, and today I have a chance to do some shooting with the long-barrel targe...

Mauser had been at the forefront of military self-loading pistol design with its C96 pistol, but by the 1930s it had lost major market share to Sauer and Walther in police and commercial guns. The Mauser 1910/1914/1934 line of compact pistols was getting a bit old, and the Sauer 38H and Walther P...

In the brief couple of years between the election of a new black-majority government in South Africa in 1994 and the dissolution of the Musgrave company, it attempted to produce a new 9mm pistol to sell to the burgeoning market of black South African citizens buying handguns. Ownership of pistols...

The US held three series of pistol trials beginning in the late 1970s to find a replacement for the venerable M1911 handgun. H&K was a participant in all three - in the first the entered a P9 and a VP-70, both of which were rejected. In the second series, they entered the P7A10 - a single-stack P...

The P7 was one of the most interesting and original handgun designs of the last few decades. Originally created for West German police trials, it was chambered in 9x19mm. As it became popular beyond Germany, the question arose of it being offered in additional calibers. The P7M10 was released in ...

The Pretoria Arms Factory was founded in 1954 by Piet Nagel and Jan Willem Dekker. both Dutch immigrants to South Africa after WW2. They began manufacturing a simplified copy of the Baby Browning pocket pistol, chambered for the .25 ACP (6.35mm Browning) cartridge. This appears to be the first d...

Would you believe it? Factory engraved Glocks are actually a thing! They have not made all that many, but they do turn up from time to time, recognizable by their ELP serial prefixes. These three were displayed by Glock at the 2002 SHOT Show, and are now on the civilian market. They were made as ...

In 1927, a Berlin resident named Richard Kulisch patented a .22 rimfire conversion kit for the Luger pistol. Kulisch’s conversion used a magazine and fired semiautomatically, which made it a much more practical conversion for military and police training than the 4mm single shot conversions than ...

Between 1909 and 1915, the huge French mail-order firm of Manufacture Francais d’Armes et Cycles de St Etienne (later called Manufrance) sold Luger pistols (as well as many other types of firearms). They were enough of a substantial customer that DWM was willing to roll-mark their pistol barrels ...

Walther was founded as a rifle making company in the 1880s, and expanded into the flourishing market for semiautomatic pocket pistols around 1910. The Model 3 was the company’s first .32 ACP caliber pistol, and was a very small gun. With a 6-round capacity it offered one round more than the Piepe...

The Whitney Wolverine was a .22LR semiauto pistol designed by Robert Hillberg in 1954. It is a very distinctive looking gun, with the nickeled versions in particular being the epitome of Atomic Age styling. Unfortunately, the gun was a commercial failure, and only 13,371 were made in total by two...

The H&K Model 4 was named for the fact that it was offered in four different calibers - .22LR, .25 ACP, .32 ACP, and .380 ACP. The gun came with a complete set of spare barrels and magazines to allow conversion between all of them, and interesting feature not offered by any other pistols like it ...