Comments by "" (@RedXlV) on "Forgotten Weapons" channel.

  1. The MP5 might have taken away a lot of Sterling's customers, but H&K was never able to secure that lucrative Galactic Empire contract.
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  2. Pretty amazing how the US military has been using AR-15 pattern rifles for 57 years, all because Curtis LeMay shot a watermelon.
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  3. Unfortunately, those would be illegal to own since they're not registered. Plus, decades of salt water exposure probably wasn't good for the guns.
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  4. One thing to remember, though, is that just because something is a myth doesn't mean soldiers won't believe the myth. The Bren's seriously inflated reputation for accuracy was something widely believed by soldiers.
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  5. When you said "Tokarev/High Power hybrid", I was hoping for a 13-round double stack magazine.
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  6. Probably because the US was more focused in rigging the tests so that they could have an excuse to not adopt a foreign rifle, than they were in actually doing proper development of the M14.
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  7. If you don't give a shit about environmental damage, I suppose that makes sense for disposing of explosives and such. But metal has scrap value, so if LA was so desperate to eliminate those guns without letting civilians own them, it's odd they didn't melt the things down.
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  8. Those US Army trials were rigged in favor of what would become the M14, so even if that burst barrel hadn't happened they would've found another reason to reject it.
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  9. 5:18 So 20 years later, they finally adopted (basically) the rifle that won the original competition.
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  10.  @leftyeh6495  I think the last time Colt made a good decision was when they bought the Armalite patents.
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  11. Honestly, they should've just kept developing the EM-2 the whole time. Though really, all of this can be traced back to Douglas MacArthur's penny-pinching in 1932, when he insisted that the M1 Garand fire .30-06 instead of .276 Pedersen because lots of ammo was already stockpiled (by which logic no army should change rifle calibers, ever). If not for that then NATO standard caliber would've become a 7mm, either the .280 British or an American cartridge with roughly the same ballistics. And to this day we'd probably see the British Army using an EM-2 variant, most of the rest of NATO using the FAL, and the US Army using a 7mm AR-10 variant.
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  12. Kiona Moeru Kaze Unfortunately, yes they do care. My father was deployed in Iraq the year before he retired from the Army National Guard. He would've brought back some guns if he'd been allowed to. And one of the other men in his unit got busted down to private after getting caught trying to sneak a pistol back home. Bayonets and helmets are still allowed for war trophies, but guns aren't.
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  13. About that similarity to the Kel-Tec. Combined with the fact that a .25 ACP version of the PSM was rejected for import? That just goes to show the real purpose of the import rules of the 1968 Gun Control Act was just to protect domestic gun-makers from foreign competition. Probably that's why the American gun industry didn't lobby against the law at the time it was passed.
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  14. It's a gun that you have to punch somebody with to shoot them. Could it be any less practical? I want one!
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  15. Yep, FN is a major supplier of the M4 and IIRC the only company that still makes the rifle-length M16 for military contracts. FN is such a major supplier of the US military that they opened up a factor in South Carolina to handle the orders. But back in the 50s it was completely unacceptable to buy from them, just because.
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  16. Honestly the UK should've brought back out the EM-2 and 7x43mm round when the new round of NATO standardization trials came around instead of developing the SA80 in (originally) 4.85x49mm. Just said "these were the ideal rifle and cartridge in 1951, and they still are the ideal rifle and cartridge in 1977." Granted, the US still would've forced everybody to adopt the American round, but still.
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  17. With regard to BSW being a more ideologically "Nazi" company than the likes of Mauser and Walther...that's because it was seized from its original Jewish owners (the Simson family) and handed over to Nazi loyalists.
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  18. agurjaunak Ultimately, I blame MacArthur. If not for his penny-pinching refusal to accept the .276 caliber Garand because there were already so many .30-06 rounds in inventory, the US Army would've already been using a 7mm. Which would've made it pretty much impossible to object to the .280 British round on the basis of its caliber.
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  19. It's amazing how such ridiculously broad patents sometimes get granted.
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  20. Meanwhile, many resistance groups made their own Sten copies. And in 1945, Germany started making their own Sten clone to arm the Volksturm.
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  21. Amazingly enough, it was one man (Colonel Rene Studler) who pretty much singlehandedly ensured that the US would not accept any cartridge that wasn't .30 caliber. And then within a decade was also responsible for going to the opposite extreme and having the US adopt a .22 caliber assault rifle.
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  22. I've always had a low opinion of Rene Studler on account of his stubborn insistence that NATO's standard rifle round had to be the rather pointless 7.62x51 (seriously, why not stick with the .30-06 if you have to have a full-power .30 caliber) and his knee-jerk dismissal of the more practical 7mm round that Britain was offering.
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  23. I want to see one of those Cochran Turkish cannons, do any of them still exist? Or even illustrations of them?
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  24.  @HeyAddieImTojo  Nope, BlasTech Industries makes the E-11, with SoroSuub also producing them under license.
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  25. Say what you will about the Moors, they had good artistic taste.
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  26.  @tombogan03884  Please, what a bunch of bullshit. Why exactly do you think the Republican Party went from being based in the Northeast and nonexistent in the South to barely existing in the Northeast and dominant in the South, while the Democratic Party made the exact opposite transition?
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  27.  @TofuTheTrashFox  The M14, the rifle that only even existed because Springfield Armory both made the rifle and was in charge of the testing to select it. And then they told Congress that they could save money by reusing all the M1 Garand tooling to make the M14, which they actually couldn't do at all.
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  28. I'm pretty sure the legal issue for Switzerland wasn't specifically that it was Israel, but that Israel was fighting a war. Swiss law to this day forbids selling weapons to combatant nations. Nicaragua wasn't fighting any wars in 1949, so it was legal to sell them rifles. And as for scrubbing the markings? I would imagine that's not so much out of any silly attempt to hide that it's a Swiss rifle, but so that it'd be harder to identify who smuggled the rifle.
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  29. Comrade Stalin How often does Congress actually worry about whether a law is a good idea?
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  30. I'm pretty sure the reason why these revolvers (and other Japanese military pistols) aren't stamped with the chrysanthemum is that they were (as was typical in the Western militaries that Japan was copying) the personal property of an officer, who had to pay with his own money for a handgun. Whereas rifles were the Emperor's property, and issued temporarily to his soldiers, and thus stamped with his chrysanthemum. While those postal service S&W No.2 revolvers were the Emperor's property, and thus carried his chrysanthemum.
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  31. The grip looks a little awkward from my perspective, but I guess the average Chinese soldier in the 1910s would've had a good bit smaller hands than I do. Imagine if General Liu hadn't died prematurely, and the Japanese had run into troops equipped with these when they invaded China.
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  32. And here I thought that wooden bullets were used by vampire hunters.
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  33. Would be nice if HS would make a semi-auto version of the VHS for Springfield to sell in the US.
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  34.  @tyrssen1  The thing is, France during late 19th and early 20th century was very secretive about its firearms development. So it's not that widely known that they were the original inventors of such groundbreaking developments as smokeless powder. Or that if not for the outbreak of WW1, they probably would've been the first nation to issue semi-auto rifles as the standard infantry weapon.
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  35. Scissors586 The FAL was an objectively superior battle rifle to the M14. That's why the US trials to select the M14 over the FAL had to be straight-up rigged to get the result they wanted. The Pentagon also concealed their own cartridge experiments from the rest of NATO that proved a smaller intermediate caliber was ideal for an infantry rifle, just so they could force through the inferior .308 round instead of the .280 British because the .308 was an American design.
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  36.  @michaelmichelsson  The average person might have been more active and physically fit in the 1930s-40s than today. But the average soldier today is a different story. Modern soldiers might carry lighter weapons than their WW2 counterparts, but their overall load is if anything even heavier.
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  37. Comrade Stalin The National Firearms Act of 1934 is part of the Internal Revenue Code, since it's nominally a tax law. But Treasury no longer has a say in the matter, because in 2002 the ATF was transferred into the Department of Justice.
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  38. .38 Special +P+ was such a silly concept in the first place. If there's a need for something more powerful than .38 Special, just use .357 Magnum instead of trying to force .38 Special revolvers to use cylinder-bursting ammo.
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  39. Scissors586 Pretty much everyone did use the FAL for decades, aside from the Communist nations that were given AK-47s for free. If the FAL was a worse battle rifle than the M14, why didn't everybody use the M14?
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  40. ​@Richard Johnson No. The Suomi was what spurred the Soviets to develop the PPSh (prior to that, the Soviets had very few submachine guns, and the PPD was not suited for mass production), but they're completely different guns. The PPSh's drum magazine, on the other hand, is a copy of the Suomi's drum.
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  41. Did the US military allow bringbacks in the 91 Gulf War?
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  42. I love that when Whitneyville stopped making their own design and started making a copy of the Remington rolling block, they called it the "improved model".
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  43. Huesudo Part of what got the M14 adopted was the promise it could be built using existing M1 Garand production lines, which would supposedly make it much cheaper than adopting the FAL. Spoiler alert: it couldn't be, and it wasn't. That was just a lie the Pentagon fed to Congress.
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  44. Catalonia also quite successfully made Astra 400 copies, in a factory in Terrassa. With the Isard, I have to wonder what was even the impetus for the design. Just because they had former employees of both Astra and Star on hand doesn't mean that mashing up the Astra 400 and Star A was a good idea.
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  45. The Sterling was also the best blaster rifle of the Galactic Civil War. :P
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  46.  @mobiusone6154  For me, the fact that it visually looks like a G36 had relations with a FAMAS is appealing. And I like the look of bullpups and the concept behind them. Though I don't own any, because I can't spare upward of 2 grand on a rifle and any bullpup cheaper than that is probably junk. (Well aside from the PS90, but in that case it's the ammo prices that'd be an issue. Plus the good stuff in 5.6x28 isn't sold to civilians, so it'd be purely a range toy.) Edit: Actually, to my surprise (I hadn't looked at them in years) the Tavors sell in the $1700 range. But something about them just looks ugly to me, even though I like bullpups in general. Oh well.
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  47. Most likely it was the Llama company itself that paid somebody to damascene that Llama pistol.
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  48. My guess would be Putin carries something with a bit more punch than a PSM. But no way he doesn't go armed.
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  49. +RyeOnHam Yeah, both Colt and Savage had to replace a few "missing" guns, with the presumption being that some got taken home. Which is probably where at least some of the never-refurbished Savage .45s came from.
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  50. A pity that the French Army didn't go with the FAMAS G2. I mean nothing wrong with the HK416, it's a fine rifle. But those FAMAS bullpups are so iconically French.
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