The Sieg was a post-WWII rifle in .30-06 caliber, developed by a US Coast Guard officer.

10 Comments

  1. Just wanted to pass along that the Sieg bullpup rife was developed by U.S. Coast Guard Gunner’s Mate James Sieg. I don’t believe he was ever a commissioned officer. He did patent his compensator in Patent number: 2451514 Filing date: Nov 21, 1945 and Issue date: Oct 19, 1948. The American Rifleman article shown in the slide show comes from the April 1946 issue. The rifle is not in the collection of the American Firearms Museum. Sieg was listed as a Maryland inventor by the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore.

  2. Just to clarify, by the American Firearms Museum, I meant the National Firearms Museum located in Alexandria, Virginia.

  3. Looking at that compensator it seems to compose of an outer shell and a perforate barrel running through it. Is that thing rifled on the inside? And does the bullet actually touch its walls? Or is it just a tube of a larger caliber that it flies through?

  4. So, why wasn’t this rifle adopted by our military when it achieved the test results that it did when tested at Fort Benning…?

  5. same reason other great ideas get discarded in the military it was different, that and military inertia after all the concept of bullpup is not new but it took any military until the 50s and 60s to Even consider adopting one.

  6. While it is quite normal for advanced designs like this to drop by the wayside, this would still make for one interesting rifle today. Change the caliber to something like the 270 Winchester Short Magnum, maybe stretch the barrel to 24 or 26 inches, and you should get one very capable Assault Rifle in a compact platform.

  7. That design does look like it could be very effective… The only problem it may have is that the gas may debris at the shooters face of hot gases may temporarily blind him… Either way in a pistol caliber it would excel as a sub machine gun muzzle.. There is also a possibility that a design like that could be upgraded to the point when a sniper could get a three round burst in a decent grouping at a moderate distance

  8. How come the second photo calls the guy Seig instead of Sieg? Is that just a spelling mistake on their part?

  9. There were very large stocks of Garands and BARs around in 1946 — enough to fight the Korean War with.

    The early versions of what would eventually become the M-14 were already around and farther along in development than the Sieg rifle.

    Finally, there were some design issues. I would be concerned with the magazine being damaged (and jamming the gub) because it doubled as a firing hand grip. I get the feeling the compensator would have been too expensive and be dropped from production weapons like the Cutts compensator was dropped from military Thompsons. Lastly, I think there were some issues about the location of the safety and magazine catch being quite close to each other, where the wrong one could be pressed …

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