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A week ago, Alex C. and Miles Vining pitted the Russian Mosin-Nagant against the German Mauser Gewehr 98 in a battle royale shootout to see which was the best rifle. Unsurprising to some, and outrageous to others, Paul Mauser’s masterpiece took home the gold and handily beat the Three Line Rifle, scoring more hits more quickly in all the shooting sessions.

At this point, I’ve written relatively few articles about small arms design in general, due to my time going to a certain other writing project. However, small arms design and theory has always captivated me, since the beginning of my interest in firearms. Ian McCollum’s recent Forgotten Weapons video about the CMG-3 has really excited my interest, as the Colt machine gun design is a virtual incarnation of “best design practices”. The video, which includes disassembly and shooting segments, is embedded below:

The subject of the 6mm Lee Navy, the US military’s shortest-serving cartridge, and also its first metric rifle cartridge, was raised in the comments section of the most recent installment of my series on the Lightweight Rifle Program of 1945-1957. There was some confusion over what, exactly, the 6mm Lee Navy was: Was it a modified 6.5mm Carcano, was it rimmed, or semi-rimmed, or was it rimless? One might think this debate is easily solved by just looking at a round of 6mm, or a rifle that fires it, but there exist multiple different kinds of 6mm ammunition, some rimmed and some rimless, and the .220 Swift, which is based on the 6mm Lee Navy, is semi-rimmed.

Heckler & Koch’s recently released P30SK is the subcompact version of their hammer-fired mid-sized P30 9mm handgun. The P30SK shares its basic design features with the P30, but has a shorter 3.27″ barrel and shorter grip with a 10-round double stack magazine. Roughly comparable to a Glock 26, the P30SK features the same ambidextrous safety as the P30S model, as well as a decocking button at the rear of the slide. The P30SK comes in six models with three different kinds of trigger groups (any of the three available with or without night sights), including P30SK LEM “V1” light DAO, P30SK “V3” DA/SA without safety but with decocker, and P30SKS “V3” DA/SA with safety and decocker. The model I received for T&E was the P30SKS V3 model with night sights.

Pistols based on rifles or submachine guns are nothing new to the shooting world. They occupy a niche market, generally where collectors cross over with those who want something more compact than a rifle but without the paperwork of an SBR. Because these pistols make sacrifices to meet legal requirements, many see them as “neither fish nor fowl”, but equally they have their defenders as well, who argue that they’re more effective than traditional handguns, but smaller than rifles.

The National Firearms Museum in Fairfax Virginia is one of the most important collections of small arms in the world, but their representatives also leave the museum and travel to places where they can find firearms that they don’t have in their collection. As part of their Curator’s Corner segment on the NFM Curator’s YouTube channel, the Museum has released two videos filmed at the Wanenmacher Tulsa Arms Show covering some of the rarest of the rare 9mm handguns:

The dark horse of the Russian next-generation individual weapon trials has been the A545, better known as the AEK-971. Where the AK-12 is essentially the well-known and respected Kalashnikov with some new architecture that supports the modern accessory-driven paradigm, the A545 is the incarnation of a more radical concept, dating back to the Abakan trials that produced the AN-94. While the AEK-971 and its derivatives fundamentally do trace their ancestry to the Kalashnikov, they incorporate the “balanced action” principle, where in addition to the mass moving rearwards, a forward-moving mass is coupled to the reciprocating group, which allows not only a great reduction in center-of-gravity shift during firing, but also gives a measure of constant-recoil effect to the firearm as well. Coupled with an effective muzzle brake, this mechanism dramatically reduces disturbances in fully automatic fire. Below is a Russian-language video from November of 2014 discussing the A545:

Earlier this week, I was asked what my thoughts were on the video below, coming from HEMA instructor Matt Easton, on his YouTube channel Scholagladiatoria. In it, he discusses some of the limitations of early blackpowder (especially muzzleloading) firearms, specifically within the context of how they affected the development of edged weapons:

The S805 Bren pistol from CZ, the company’s next-generation modular follow-on to the often-mistaken-for-an-AK Vz. 58 has finally reached American storefronts. We’ll talk about the rifle itself in a minute, but first Tim of the Military Arms Channel has already released a medium-length video discussing the new pistol, embedded below:

In 1957, the T44E4 rifle was formally adopted by the United States Armed Forces as the United States Rifle, 7.62mm, M14, but this only marked the beginning of the rifle’s troubles. After numerous delays and production crises – including the rejection in December of 1960 of 1,784 of H&R receivers (about ten percent of the receivers that had been made up to that time) that could not withstand the pressure of firing due to a steel mix-up – Robert McNamara made a famous speech on the rifle program in June of 1961, stating: “I think it is a disgrace the way the project was handled. I don’t mean particularly by the Army, but I mean by the nation. This is a relatively simple job, building a rifle, compared to building a satellite or a lunar lander or a missile system.” At that time, there existed a grand total of only 133,386 M14 rifles, despite the type having been adopted four years prior.

What rifle influenced Kalashnikov’s famous carbine design more, the Garand M1, or the Haenel MP 43? This question was broached by blogger Jeff of TwistRate in a video posted to the Full30 gun video hosting website recently. Readers can follow the link to watch that video before reading my discussion of this question below.

The 5.56mm M855 round has received considerable criticism for its terminal characteristics. Detractors point out that the round fails to fragment when the striking velocity is too low – such as when fired from a very short barrel or when the bullet has slowed down thanks to its relatively unimpressive ogive shape – or when the bullet strikes the target at a very low angle of attack.