Semiauto pistol
Vintage Saturday: Rifles? What Rifles?
US World War I doughboys with M1911 pistols on display. Trigger discipline wasn’t what it is today.
Handgun
Semiauto pistol
Bergmann No. 2 / 1896 Pistol
After several years of work and at least two Swiss military trials, Louis Schmeisser’s design of the Bergmann self-loading pistol was still not quite good enough to become a commercial success. Only a few pistols […]
Patent drawings
Bergmann 1894 – No.1 Pistol
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 […]
Patent drawings
Bergmann-Schmeisser 1893 Pistol
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 […]
Commentary
Cavalry Use of Pistols?
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 […]
Machine pistol
Vintage Saturday: Premature Anti-Fascists
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
Book Review: Iver Johnson Arms & Cycle Works Firearms 1871-1993
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 […]
Manuals
Borchardt C93 Manual
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 […]
Machine pistol
Czech vz.61 Photos and Catalog
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 […]
Patent drawings
Maxim-Silverman 1896 Pistol
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 […]