Rifles - Forgotten Weapons

British Money-Walker 1868 Trials Rifle

May 1, 2021 Ian McCollum 5

Patented in 1868 by Colonel G.H. Money and Mr. M. Walker, this rifle was one of the 10 finalists in the British breechloading rifle trials of 1868. It is a simple falling block system with […]

Book Review: The Green Meanie L96A1 by Steve Houghton

April 27, 2021 Ian McCollum 8

Following up on his 2018 “The British Sniper: A Century of Evolution”, Steve Houghton has now released a followup book on the L96A1 in particular: “The Green Meanie”. This rifles was a paradigm shift for […]

Australia’s FAL-Based L2A1 Heavy Automatic Rifle

April 21, 2021 Ian McCollum 47

Many the nations that adopted the FAL (or L1A1, in Commonwealth terminology) opted to also use a heavy-barreled variant of the same rifle as a light support weapon. In the Commonwealth, this was designated L2A1 […]

System Kuhn: A Novel Single Shot Breechloader

April 20, 2021 Ian McCollum 10

This is an interesting single-shot breechloading system built by Kuhn of Besançon – a city near Switzerland in eastern France. It is clearly a sporting rifle, firing an 11mm black powder cartridge and probably dates […]

Semiauto ZK-383 on the Range

April 17, 2021 Ian McCollum 18

The Czech ZK-383 is a magnificent submachine gun, but sadly very scarce in the United States. So when I saw the semiauto example, I wanted to take it out to the range for some plinking. […]

Howard’s Thunderbolt: A Remarkably Compact Carbine

April 16, 2021 Ian McCollum 1

Designed by brothers Charles and Sebre Howard and first patented in 1862, this is a single shot lever action produced by the Whitneyville Armory between 1866 and 1870. It is a really neat compact design […]

MAS-45: The French .22 Trainer Designed by Mauser

April 14, 2021 Ian McCollum 17

When the French occupied the Mauser factory in April 1945, they found all the tooling to produce .22 caliber rifles still in place and in good order (among other things). The French military did not […]

Springfield Model 1795 Musket: America’s First Military Production

April 8, 2021 Ian McCollum 10

The first US-production military arm was the “US musket, Charleville pattern” – known today as the Model 1795 Springfield Musket. Copied from the French 1766 model Charleville which made up the bulk of existing US […]

Miniature Guns for the Fascist Youth: Italian Balilla Carbines

April 6, 2021 Ian McCollum 12

As part of his effort to imbue Italy with a fascist culture, Mussolini formed the ONB, or National Balilla Organization as a replacement for all other youth organizations in Italy in 1926. It was intended […]

Daewoo K2: The South Korean AK/AR Hybrid

April 5, 2021 Ian McCollum 30

South Korea experimented with a series of rifle designs in 7.62x51mm in the 1960s and early 1970s, but none of them came close to production. In 1974 a license was acquired from Colt for Daewoo […]