Ever since the first single shot pistol was crafted centuries ago, people have just dug handguns. In the intervening half millennium, thousands of designs have come forth and a few have risen above all others. Last year Guns.com brought you eight to shoot before you die. Here are five more that just have to pass through your hands before you head to that great gun show in the sky.
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Long before Gaston Glock stopped building curtain rods and moved on to polymer pistols, the Austrian firm of Steyr was producing innovative handgun designs. One of their most curious and downright oddball offerings was their Model 1912.
The Austria of today is a small country about the size of Maine. The Austria of 1912 however was much different. With a population of more than 50-million people, it was the center of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and included almost half of central Europe including what we know today as Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Croatia, Slovakia, and of course, Austria. This polyglot country had a large army of more than a million men when mobilized. Poorly led but massive in size and brilliantly equipped, the Austrian army used some of the best small arms, machine guns, and field artillery of the time. When you realize that the companies that are now Steyr-Mannlicher, FEG, and CZ were behind these weapons, it’s easy to see gun making is in their blood.
In 1911, the regular Army was equipped with the striker-fired 8mm M1907 Roth-Steyr. To arm the Austrian Landwehr, a form of National Guard, the government of the Kaiser (they had one too), needed a new and modern pistol. While the regulars had a new handgun, the reservists of the Landwher still had to make due with old Gasser revolvers. With war in the neighboring Balkans and a looming crisis with Tsarist Russia, the time for an upgrade was at hand.
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Before this week, the quiet little city of New Rochelle, New York was perhaps known as the hometown of American Pie writer Don McLean and of 1960s “Catch me if you can” conman Frank Abagnale. Going further back, during the Revolutionary War, George Washington stopped in the town on his way to assume command of the Army. Patriot Thomas Paine considered the Father of the American Revolution because of the pamphlet “Common Sense” he penned, settled in New Rochelle after the War of Independence and was buried there.
This is even more shocking because the city council just banned the historic Gadsden Flag from being flown on city property.
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Suppose the walking dead attacked your house. Would you (a) defend yourself; (b) lock the door and dial 911; (c) write a Facebook post blaming the sequester; or (d) negotiate?
If you don’t know that the correct answer is (a), you won’t survive the zombie apocalypse.
When zombies attack, you’ll need your gun
If you’ve got a habit of poking around at gun shows or shops and you ever chance upon an old hinged-framed, break-top revolver under the glass, take a moment to look at the grips. More likely than not, you will see a stylized owl staring back at you from the black plastic. If you do, it’s probably an Iver Johnson Safety Automatic, and if you have some spare change, it’s worth your time to ask to look at it.
The Iver Johnson Arms & Cycle Works (yes, makers of handguns and fine bicycles), was started back in 1871 by a 30-year old Norwegian born inventor of the same name. Truth be told, it started as the Johnson and Bye Company, but eventually Johnson bought out Bye and went at it alone. The Fitchburg, Massachusetts based factory concentrated more on its bicycles than its firearms and employed many Scandinavian immigrants including one Oscar Frederick Mossberg, who later went on to do some work in shotguns with his sons. Just before Iver died in 1895, his company began to produce a new revolver that the late engineer had perfected late in life known as the Safety Automatic.
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I bet some of you thought that the Taurus Judge revolver was an earth-shattering innovation when you first saw it. I mean who couldn’t love a five-shot revolver that could hurl either .410 shotgun shells or .45 Long Colt as fast as you could pull the trigger? Well, the thing is the Judge wasn’t first.
The MIL Thunder 5 beat it by more than a decade.
But good luck finding one now.
MIL popped up in 1991 in Piney Flats, TN and made one product, the Thunder 5 revolver. Unlike almost every other firearms company in US history, it’s hard to dig into just who this company was. Manuals for the Thunder 5 are listed as being distributed by Dragun Enterprises with a Murfreesboro PO Box address. SOTs information in the ATF’s archives comes back to Holston Inc., which is another dead end.
I would like to tell you the story behind the gun, but it seems like this one was written on an etch-a-sketch.
But what I DO know about it is in this article at GUNS.com
When you leave the house and go about your daily travels, are you armed? If so, with what? Do you vary multiple weapons, and if so, do you carry more than one firearm? Let us look at that.Putting your eggs all in one basket– or for the subject of this article, trusting your life and those around you to one imperfect gadget, is borderline foolhardy. Yes, you may have a super tactical top-of-the-line CCW handgun that you have practiced with for a decade and trust implicitly, but it could still fail. It can be stripped away. It could be forced out of battery by a scenario that you never conceived of. Your magazine could go one way and your gun could go the other. A million things can happen.
Then what?
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Did O.F. Mossberg and sons ever make a pistol? When someone says the word ‘Mossberg’ most gun enthusiasts say, “shotgun” and leave it at that. Folks in the know usually then pipe up and inform the short sighted that for decades and still the company has made rifles. But then there is that one guy who just smirks because he remembers that yes, Mossberg did make a pistol a long time ago and it’s name was indicative of its stature—the Brownie.
Swedish immigrant Oscar Frederick Mossberg came to the US in the 1880s from Europe. Once here, he found work with the Fitchburg, Massachusetts based bicycle company, operated by fellow Scandinavian immigrant Iver Johnson. The two would work together not only on velocipedes but also revolvers.
When Mossberg left Iver Johnson, he went on to manage the small factory of the C.S. Shattuck Arms Co. in nearby Hatfield, Massachusetts. From there he went to work for Stevens and finally for New Haven, Connecticut based Marlin-Rockwell. In 1919 when Marlin Rockwell went belly up (they primarily made machineguns and WWI had just ended), the unemployed 53-year old OF Mossberg, and his two sons started a new firearms company of their own, And they did it with the Brownie as thier first product.
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If every gun tells a story, the FBI’s reference firearms collection could fill a very, very large book. The inventory of more than 7,000 firearms—curated over 80 years—contains just about every make and model, from John Dillinger’s Prohibition-era revolver to the modern battlefield’s M16, and almost everything in between. More here:
In one of the most heinous acts of terrorism committed in modern times on the soil of the United States, the pair of immigrant bombing suspects in Boston apparently had trouble laying hands on firearms.
The two suspects in the Boston bombing, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26 and his brother Dzhokhar, engaged police in multiple active firefights across the city. The thing is, according to a Reuter’s article, they were not licensed to own guns in the town where they lived. Neither brother had a firearms card on file with the Cambridge Police Department, a requirement of local and state law. The younger brother, only aged 19, was not eligible to apply for handgun ownership at all.
Therefore, the weapons in their possession were illegally owned for the jurisdiction they lived in.
So they went after a cop to try and get his guns…
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