Ian McCollum - Forgotten Weapons

Q&A #49, with Mike and Fabian of Bloke on the Range

March 11, 2021 Ian McCollum 25

Today’s Q&A was filmed in Finland, with special guests Mike and Fabian from Bloke on the Range, who came out to shoot the scaled-down Finnish Brutality 2021 with me. If you like what you see […]

L4: The Bren in 7.62mm NATO

March 10, 2021 Ian McCollum 35

When the British military transitioned form the .303 British cartridge to 7.62mm NATO in the 1950s, it replaced the Enfield rifles with the new L1A1 SLR (the FAL) but retained the Bren gun as a […]

An Interesting Possibility: The FG-42 in 8x33mm Kurz?

March 9, 2021 Ian McCollum 115

Here’s an interesting thought – what if they made the FG-42 in 8x33mm Kurz? Well, they actually did, in very small numbers. The rifle’s designer, Louis Stange, actually thought it was a really good idea, […]

Clement Pottet: Father of the Shotgun Shell

March 8, 2021 Ian McCollum 17

Clement Pottet was one of the original fathers of the modern shotgun shell. He took the work of men like Pauly and developed a paper-walled, metallic-base shell for shotgun use. He had two main French […]

Announcement: “Chassepot to FAMAS” Being Reprinted

March 6, 2021 Ian McCollum 7

https://www.HeadstampPublishing.com/french-rifle-book Yep, after seeing copies showing up on eBay and Amazon for as much as $500, I realized that if we don’t do a second printing I will become the very thing I hate dealing […]

Finnish Brutality 2021: Winter War 2-Gun with a Finnish M39 Mosin

March 6, 2021 Ian McCollum 10

Brought to you by Varusteleka and Sako, Finnish Brutality 2021 was run as a much-reduced private event to meet Finnish Covid-19 event size regulations. We only had three stages and 7 shooters, but the full […]

Göring’s Platinum Lugers

March 5, 2021 Ian McCollum 28

There are a lot of guns out there attributed to German leaders and politicians of the Second World War. Many of these are completely specious, and many more are true simply because these men had […]

Book Review: The Complete Book of Tokarev Pistols

March 4, 2021 Ian McCollum 7

The Tokarev is a pistol that does not have much written about it in the world of firearms reference literature – largely because it was not until the collapse of the Soviet Union and the […]

Wartime Changes: The Bren MkI Modified and Bren MkII

March 3, 2021 Ian McCollum 19

The British lost some 90% of their stock of Bren light machine guns in the disastrous Dunkirk evacuation, and in the following months rushed to rearm. Part of this program was a two-tiered simplification of […]

How Did I Get My Guns to Finnish Brutality? Polaris Logistics.

March 2, 2021 Ian McCollum 6

I took my own Finnish M39 Mosin and TT-33 Tokarev to Finland for Finnish Brutality, along with a WWSD-2020 carbine. I’ve gotten a lot of questions from people wondering how I did that, and the […]