Rifles - Forgotten Weapons

Japanese Type 97 Sniper Rifle (Video)

April 27, 2015 Ian McCollum 34

The most common Japanese sniper rifle of World War II was the Type 97, essentially a Type 38 Arisaka rifle with a 2.5x telescopic sight mounted to the side of the receiver. About 22,000 of […]

German soldier with a captured Polish Maroszek wz.35 anti-tank rifle

Vintage Saturday: Antitank Rifle

April 25, 2015 Ian McCollum 36

German soldier in France with a captured Polish Maroszek wz.35 anti-tank rifle.

Blake Bolt Action Rifle at RIA

April 21, 2015 Ian McCollum 26

The Blake was one of many rifle designs submitted to the US Army trials that would ultimately result in the adoption of the Krag-Jorgensen as the US Army’s standard rifle. The main innovation of Blake’s […]

A Semiauto FG-42 up on Gunbroker

April 19, 2015 Ian McCollum 15

Rick from SMG Guns dropped me a line to let me know that he has put one of his 8mm semiauto FG-42 rifles up for sale on Gunbroker. In fact, it’s actually the exact demo […]

Japanese Pedersen Rifle at RIA

April 19, 2015 Ian McCollum 10

After he failed to win US military adoption of his toggle-locked rifle design, John Pedersen went looking for other countries that might be interested in the gun. One of these was Japan, which experimented with […]

ZH-29 Semiauto Rifle at RIA

April 17, 2015 Ian McCollum 23

The ZH-29 was the brainchild of noted Czech arms designer Emmanuel Holek in the late 1920s. It was one of the earliest practical and reliable semiauto rifles available, although Holek and the Brno factory were […]

Collected Works of John Pedersen

April 11, 2015 Ian McCollum 8

John Pedersen was one of the more prolific and successful gun designers in American history, having even been described by John Moses Browning as “the greatest gun designer in the world”. And yet, many people […]

Prototype Optic on an M1 at RIA

April 10, 2015 Ian McCollum 6

In the years after WWII, several countries experimented with general-use optical sights on service rifles. The Germans had pioneered the concept with the ZF-41 long eye relief optic during the war (and the ZF-4, to […]

PzB-39 German Anti-Tank Rifle at RIA

April 8, 2015 Ian McCollum 35

Most countries still had anti-tank rifles in their military inventory at the beginning of WWII – the Solothurn S18-100, the Lahti L39, the Boys AT Rifle, the PTRD and PTRS, and so on. For Germany, […]

Mondragon 1894 Straight-Pull at RIA

April 5, 2015 Ian McCollum 29

Most people who recognize the name Mondragon know it from Manuel Mondragon’s model 1908 semiauto rifle, the first such rifle to be adopted on a large scale by a military (the Mexican Army, in this […]