Video - Forgotten Weapons

Colt/Browning Sight Safety 1900

January 13, 2014 Ian McCollum 30

In 1897, John Browning patented four different types of automatic pistol – a blowback type that would become the FN/Browning 1900, a gas-operated type similar in concept to his 1895 machine gun, a rotating-barrel type, […]

Book Review: The M1 Garand Rifle

January 2, 2014 Ian McCollum 5

I have been procrastinating the addition of a good book on the M1 Garand rifle into my own library, reading the various published material off of friends’ shelves. Now I’m glad that I have put […]

Russian Winchester 1895 (Video)

December 30, 2013 Ian McCollum 28

By the 1890s, Winchester had established an extremely successful business in lever-action rifles. John Browning’s designs for the 1886, 1892, and 1894 models had proven very popular, and so Winchester (seeing the potential of the […]

Johnson M1941 Video

December 9, 2013 Ian McCollum 28

Melvin Johnson was a gun designer who felt that the M1 Garand rifle had several significant flaws – so he developed his own semiauto .30-06 rifle to supplement the M1. His thought was that if […]

Model 1871 Ward-Burton Rifle

December 2, 2013 Ian McCollum 10

The Model 1871 Ward-Burton was one of the early experimental rifles trialled by the US military in its search for a new breechloading rifle to replace the theoretically-interim Allin conversion that made muzzle-loading rifles into […]

How to Set Up Your Vickers Gun

November 29, 2013 Ian McCollum 6

Some archived footage here, of the Manchester Regiment showing us how to properly set up a Vickers gun…and how not to! The clip comes from the Museum of the Manchester Regisment, in Ashton-under-Lyne east of […]

Book Review: Allied Rifle Contracts in America

November 21, 2013 Ian McCollum 6

One of the characteristics that often leads me to be particularly interested in a given gun is a long and convoluted history. I really enjoy finding firearms that have found their way across the world […]

Pakistani 44-Bore Followup

November 19, 2013 Ian McCollum 48

Thanks to a Pakistani reader named Adi who happens to own a 44-Bore rifle (an AK with the chamber reamed to accept 8×33 Kurz cartridges), we have some a bit more information on this interesting […]

Egyptian Hakim in a 2-Gun Match

November 18, 2013 Ian McCollum 34

This past weekend was another 2-Gun Action Challenge Match, and this time I decided to shoot my Hakim in it. The Hakim is an Egyptian license-built copy of the Swedish AG-42 Ljungman (you can find […]

Book Review: The World’s Fighting Shotguns

November 14, 2013 Ian McCollum 38

Shotguns are a subject I don’t cover much, and I’ll admit that’s because of a prejudice on my part. I just don’t find most of them to be particularly interesting…but then I had the chance […]