Collector Corner

Building, shooting, and enjoying this LRB/Colt M16A1 gun has allowed me to learn and experience a little bit of history.

The original Pythons were true works of art and in 2022, Colt fans excitedly witnessed the revival of an old favorite.

I picked this gun up for an absolute steal. Sure the finish is rough, and one of the grips is slightly broken, but I was incredibly excited to pick it up and hunt down a few boxes of ammo.

When I was a (very) young man, the choices in handguns were quite a bit more limited than they are today. After you made the decision of whether to go with a revolver or an automatic pistol, you more than likely ended up with a Smith & Wesson or Colt revolver in .38 Special or [...]

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.

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.

When the 1873 came out it was a paradigm shift. A repeating rifle that was as reliable and capable as it was practical. However, it was still a pistol caliber carbine. For real rifle work, you had to go to something like an 1869 Sharps, a Ballard Perfection rifle, or a Remington Rolling Block. That’s what buffalo hunters used. What these long range, big game guns had in common was that they were all single shot firearms. The Winchester Model 1876 changed that forever.

The 1873 Winchester sported a steel receiver along with proper metallurgy in its barrel that allowed the gun to handle the relatively high performance of the .44 WCF round. Various barrel lengths and contours, engraved variations, and rifle, carbine, and musket versions kept things spicy.

Almost every shooter in the US has heard of or seen the Mosin-Nagant rifle, due to the large volume of them that were imported over the last decade or so. The WWII variant was quite readily available and inexpensive until very recently.