Rifles - Forgotten Weapons

Colt 601: The AR-15 Becomes a Military Rifle

December 25, 2019 Ian McCollum 21

The AR-15 rifle was originally developed by Armalite as an offshoot of the AR-10 rifle designed by Eugene Stoner. How that second-thought rifle became the US standard military rifle – and the longest-serving infantry rifle […]

Prototype Mauser 1917 Trench Carbine

December 20, 2019 Ian McCollum 15

In the latter stages of World War One, the German military was looking for new arms for its Sturmtruppen. Without a reliable self-loading rifle design to use, they instead focused on pistil caliber arms. The […]

GIGN’s MR73 Sniper Revolver in .357 Magnum

December 16, 2019 Ian McCollum 29

Courtesy of the French Ministry of the Interior, we have a chance to take a look at an authentic GIGN sniper model MR73 revolver today. GIGN is the elite intervention element of the French Gendarmerie, […]

Terry’s Breechloading Carbine: Used by Hussars and Confederates

December 5, 2019 Ian McCollum 12

This capping breechloader was patented in the UK by William Terry in 1856, and adopted (in limited numbers) by the British military in 1860. Approved for cavalry use, it was issued to the 18th Hussars, […]

Tippman’s Half-Scale .22 Rimfire Browning 1917 Machine Gun

December 4, 2019 Ian McCollum 12

In 1983, Dennis Tippman formed a company to manufacture half-scale functional replicas of Browning machine guns – the 1919 and 1917 specifically. He built these as both fully automatic and semiautomatic (the semiauto design being […]

Valkyrie Arms Semiauto M3A1 Grease Gun

December 3, 2019 Ian McCollum 7

Valkyrie Arms was formed in 1993 to produce semiautomatic copies of classic military machine guns, and in 2004 they introduced a semiauto M3A1 “Grease Gun”. The M3 and M3A1 are particularly rare guns as registered […]

FN FAL With an Original FN Scope

November 28, 2019 Ian McCollum 7

When the FN FAL was first being sold, many militaries that bought it opted to mount optics on a small percentage of their rifles. These military setups used a variety of different optics and mounts, […]

Pieper’s 7-Barrel Mitrailleuse: Like a Shotgun But Accurate

November 23, 2019 Ian McCollum 26

Manufactured in the 1880s and 1890s to serve the professional hunter market, Pieper’s 7-barrel Mitrailleuse was essentially a rimfire volley gun. It was offer in both .22 rimfire and .32 rimfire calibers, both models having […]

Civil War Smith Carbine and its Rubber Cartridges

November 22, 2019 Ian McCollum 13

The US military experimented with a wide variety of breechloading carbines during the Civil War. One of these that got a bit of a head start on the others was the Smith carbine, patented in […]

Springfield’s SAR-4800 FAL…in 5.56mm

November 20, 2019 Ian McCollum 11

In the early 1990s, the Brazilian Imbel factory made a small run of FAL rifles converted to 5.56mm using AR magazines. They used standard FAL receivers and bolt carriers, with a boltface cut for 5.56x45mm […]