Handgun - Forgotten Weapons

Bergmann 1894 – No.1 Pistol

November 6, 2013 Ian McCollum 18

As Theodore Bergmann and Louis Schmeisser embarked on the process of perfecting and improving their production pistols, they used a numbering system to identify the different models that were made. There are also model years […]

Bergmann-Schmeisser 1893 Pistol

November 5, 2013 Ian McCollum 17

Today we are starting the story of the Bergmann automatic pistol – one of the early successful self-loading handguns, and one which led to a less prominent firearms dynasty than some other big names of […]

Cavalry Use of Pistols?

October 29, 2013 Ian McCollum 66

Here’s a subject I don’t know much about, and I’m hoping some of the folks reading this can help educate me: cavalry use of handguns. How many groups actually experimented with handguns as a primary […]

Vintage Saturday: Premature Anti-Fascists

October 19, 2013 Ian McCollum 27

Canadian volunteers of the Mackenzie–Papineau Battalion in the Spanish Civil War, armed with with grenades and Mauser Schnellfeuer machine pistols or (more likely) Spanish-made copies thereof.

Book Review: Iver Johnson Arms & Cycle Works Firearms 1871-1993

October 17, 2013 Ian McCollum 18

The Iver Johnson company doesn’t get much respect or recognition these days, but they made a staggering number of generally very good, inexpensive handguns for many decades. The “cheap” image of the brand has largely […]

Borchardt C93 Manual

October 16, 2013 Ian McCollum 12

The C93 Borchardt was the first truly commercially successful self-loading pistol, and it was the basis for the P08 Luger which would become one of the most iconic pistols in history. I had the opportunity […]

Czech vz.61 Photos and Catalog

October 9, 2013 Ian McCollum 25

Thanks to reader Denny, we have some more information on the Czech vz.61 “Skorpion” PDW, including pages from a CZ catalog advertising three different versions of the gun for sale. These three variants are: vz.61 […]

Maxim-Silverman 1896 Pistol

October 2, 2013 Ian McCollum 35

We all know of Hiram Maxim for his groundbreaking work in machine gun development – but not many people are familiar with his automatic pistol designs. In fact, this is at least partly because the […]

Skorpion Scarab 9mm (Video)

September 30, 2013 Ian McCollum 22

In my defense, I want to point out that the only reason I wanted to get one of these pistols was to see how much it actually resembled the Czech vz.61 Skorpion, wich is a […]

H&K VP-70Z (Video)

September 23, 2013 Ian McCollum 53

I recently had the chance to hit the range with a VP-70Z, the semiauto civilian version of H&K’s 1970 machine pistol. It is notable both for being one of the few production machine pistols around […]