Historical Guns

On June 30, 1934, the German Schutzstaffel (SS) under orders from Adolph Hitler executed Operation Hummingbird. This decapitation strike against their erstwhile brothers in the Sturmabteilung (SA) was intended to remove the reprobate SA commander Ernst Rohm and consolidate supreme power in pre-WW2 Germany under Hitler’s personal control. Between 85 and 200 Germans fell to these brutal extra-judicial killings. History has come to refer to Operation Hummingbird as the Night of the Long Knives.

In the spring of 1968, he secured a room in an Atlanta boarding house. An avid reader, he happened upon an article in the Atlanta Constitution that outlined the coming itinerary for civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. Equipped with this tactical information, the career criminal and perennial loser James Earl Ray loaded up his Mustang and made a quick trek to Alabama.

Unboxing the test rifle, it was clear at a glance that the First Lite is not Roy Weatherby’s Mark V of yesteryear. The Mark V line got something of a makeover in the last few years, and the result is an updated take on an iconic and distinctly American rifle design.

On February 1, 1968, Saigon, South Vietnam, was in the opening throes of the Tet Offensive. North Vietnamese commanders called it “The General Offensive and Uprising of Tet Mau Than 1968.” Two days prior more than 80,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army troops had attacked more than 100 towns including 36 of 44 provincial South Vietnamese capitals.

Reading about the conspiracy theories that orbit around the eradication of the Nepalese monarchy makes the JFK assassination look like a first-grade field trip to the zoo.

Setting her baby on a changing table she answered the front door to find a 17-year-old Jamaican named Lee Boyd Malvo. Malvo produced a .45-caliber handgun and shot the woman in the face. Thus began one of the most brutal killing sprees in American history.

Speaking in Turkey, Russian diplomat Andrei Karlov was shot on live television for all the world to see. The gun involved is little-known but powerful.

In August of 1916, the British 100th Company of the Machine Gun Corps fired their ten Vickers guns continuously for twelve hours. Using 100 barrels they fired a million rounds without a single failure. The Vickers gun continued in British military service until 1968.

Teaming up with Springfield, Air Venturi is pleased to announce two new M1 Carbine replicas, a .177-caliber BB gun and a skirmish-ready airsoft rifle.