Historical Guns

During WWII, a man from Nepal held off more than thirty Japanese troops, while armed with just a knife and Lee Enfield rifle. This is the story of Lachhiman Gurung and his rifle.

The British Sten gun was effective at close range, cheap, and easy to make, but nearly botched the assassination of one of Hitler’s henchmen.

The M3 submachine gun was built for WWII. The stamped steel gun was nicknamed the “Grease Gun,” but it cost Uncle Sam only $18 to make.

The 1911 pistol is as much a part of the fabric of America as is baseball, fast cars, and pretty girls. Literally, countless young men headed off into harm’s way with one of Mr. Browning’s hand cannons tucked into their belts.

The M1 carbine was designed as a Personal Defense Weapon of sorts. It combined the portability of a handgun with the magazine capacity of an autoloading rifle.

The M1911 was the finest combat handgun at the time of the World Wars. For close range firepower and reliability, nothing beat the M1917 revolver.

The Thompson Submachine Gun was a weapon respected by Prohibition-era gangsters before being toted across Europe by American soldiers in WWII.

In 1952 the Czech military adopted a radically strange new pistol designed by two brothers, Jan and Jaroslav Kratochvil. The vz52 (not to be confused with the vz52 rifle of the same designation that entered Czech service the same year) represented a unique application of the roller-locked action pioneered by the German MG42 machine gun. While HK dabbled in the same thing with their short-lived P9S handgun, the vz52 pistol was otherwise unique.

Georg Luger left an indelible mark on the firearms world that persists to this very day. His extraordinary eponymous handgun was not an altogether original design, however. His mentor, a German engineer named Hugo Borchardt, was actually the first to realize the human knee would translate into a serviceable firearm.