laststandonzombieisland

Those of you who have ever looked at the slide of a Springfield  have long ago realized that the pistol was made in a faraway land by the name of Croatia. There, the gun started life in 1999 as the HS2000 pistol. However, what you may not know is that the old HS owed its beginnings to a weirder looking design that preceded it.

The Balkan European country of Croatia is famous for inventing the necktie, and saving Europe a few times from Turkish invasions, among other things. Croatian immigrants (Nikola Tesla included) helped build the modern United States and their descendants here include such well-known persons as Nick Saban, Eric Bana, and John Malkovich.

Once part of the polyglot People’s Republic of Yugoslavia (and before 1918 the Austro-Hungarian Empire), Croatia had to fight for its independence in the 1990s.

More than 12,000 Croats died in a four-year period before their country stood as a free nation. Among those veterans of that conflict were Ivan Abcic and Marko Vukovic. The pair set about producing pistols for the struggling Croatian army during the war from their company known as IM Metal.

And what they came up with was a little…different.

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