The strange, true small print of gun history — the facts worth stealing for the campfire. Educational, occasionally oddball, and every one of them checked the way we check everything: carefully, and only as certain as the record allows.
In 1846 a Ranger captain named Samuel Walker told Samuel Colt precisely what a fighting revolver lacked. Colt built it: the Walker of 1847, over four pounds of hand cannon — a gun designed by its maker and its customer, arguing in letters.
The two most confused words in the gun shop name two different machines. One stores cartridges under spring pressure and feeds the action; the other merely holds them still so they can be loaded. The full argument, settled fairly, lives in the Journal.
A shotgun's gauge is a count: how many lead balls of bore diameter weigh exactly one pound. Twelve balls, twelve gauge. Bigger number, smaller balls, smaller bore — the oddest unit in the shop, explained in the Journal.
The Kolibri, sold in Austria before the First World War, fired a 2.7mm cartridge, weighed under eight ounces, and was a genuine commercial product — a pistol you could lose in a coat pocket full of change.
Hiram Percy Maxim patented the first successful gun silencer — then pointed the same baffled tube at car exhausts and sold that as a silencer too. Cars got a new word, 'muffler.' Guns kept his.
Richard Gatling argued his rapid-fire gun would shrink armies: if a few men could do the firepower of hundreds, fewer soldiers would march into battle and disease. He wrote the logic down in earnest. History graded the paper differently.
Avtomat Kalashnikova, model of 1947. The most famous rifle on earth is named for its designer, Mikhail Kalashnikov, and the year it appeared. No mystique, no mythology — a name and a date, stamped on history.
Before Prohibition made it infamous, the Thompson was advertised to ranchers and homeowners as protection for property and herd. The gangster era rewrote its reputation; the ads are still there in black and white.
John Browning's father was a gunsmith, and the shop was the boy's first school. The son went on to file some 128 firearm patents — the 1911 and the Auto-5 among them. Some families pass down land. His passed down tolerances.
The spiral grooves in a barrel spin the bullet the way fingertips spin a football. A spinning projectile holds its line the same way a tight spiral does — gyroscopic stability, written into steel. The long-range desk runs on it.
Every other shotgun bore is a gauge — a count of lead balls to the pound. The .410 is a plain caliber: the bore's diameter in inches. Do the ball math on it and you get a '67 gauge,' which is exactly why the system politely looks the other way.
The 1911 entered American service in 1911 and remained the standard sidearm until 1985. Seventy-four years — longer than any standard-issue handgun before or since, and the platform beneath half the custom guns on this site.
One premium smith, one new release, one gun worth your attention — one email, every Sunday. Free forever. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.