Forgotten Weapons

Seeing as it's Christmas here's a list with facts about each of the guns that appear in Die Hard. Where John McClane topples a terrorist takeover of a Christmas party at Nakatomi Plaza....

The truce occurred five months after hostilities had begun. Lulls occurred in the fighting as armies ran out of men and munitions and commanders reconsidered their strategies following the stalemate of the Race to the Sea and the indecisive result of the First Battle of Ypres. In the week leading up to 25 December, French,...

Free cookie for anyone who can name every machinegun in the background. (The cookie is a lie)

This rifle is in exception condition considering it would have been property of the Imperial German Army decades before the first world war....

That was actually feed back given from the US army to the development team at Heckler & Koch....

No one knows precisely when this pocket pistol was made, or who it was made for. What we do know is that its elaborate decoration, in the Art Deco style, makes it highly unusual and of great artistic interest. Different markings on its components tell part of the story. It was made by the Belgian firearms manufacturer Fabrique...

This soldier was likely ordered into formation and arrived without his rifle. He was provided a new one.

A one of a kind prototype. Chambered in .308....

In his downtime in the trenches, this soldier has added a colorful paint job to his weapon in the style of Petrykivka which is a style often used to decorate the interior and exterior of Ukrainian homes and everyday household items.

The tools required to manufacturer rifling in traditional ways are highly cost prohibitive. Electro-Chemical Machining (ECM) is a method where it can be done for very cheap....

This sketch depicts the marksman of the Grand International Rifle Match in the different shooting positions thought best for accuracy at the time....

Perhaps not a weapon per se, but thought people would find this neat.

February 1957, the composite barrel of one of the test rifles failed during a round of harsh endurance testing. The rifle, No.1002, had fired 5,564 rounds during the testing program. The composite failure caused the barrel to burst in the middle of the handguard, the rifle’s operator was not injured....

The Jezail is the traditional rifle of the Afghan tribal fighter, although it originated in Persia (Iran). Distinctive primarily for its uniquely curved style of buttstock, these rifles still maintain a symbolic importance although they are utterly obsolete....

The APS (Avtomat Podvodnyj Spetsialnyj) was developed in the early 1970s as a way to provide greater firepower to Russian frogmen (who had been previously armed with knives and the SPP-1M underwater pistol). It was initially used by Russian armed forces, but has also been sold on the international market since the fall of the...

The Johnson had some interesting features – primarily its magazine design. It used a fixed 10-round rotary magazine, which could be fed by 5-round standard stripper clips or loose individual cartridges. It could also be topped up without interfering with the rifle’s action, unlike the M1. On the other hand, it was not well...

Moral of the Story: The client isn't always right....

This German design features a brass cocking piece that's integrated into the trigger guard. Pulling it back would allow you to rack the slide one handed....

This rifle features a coffee grinder in its stock to allow it's wielder to grind coffee beans....

After his success with the AR 10/15/16/18 series of rifles, designer Eugene Stoner went on to develop the Stoner 63 weapons system with the Cadillac Gage company. The Stoner 63 was in many ways a natural evolution of the AR15 rifle, with a strong emphasis on modularity....

In addition to building three main patterns of straight-pull bolt action rifle for the Canadian military and the commercial market, Sir Charles Ross also experimented with self-loading rifles....