Our friend Ronaldo Olive was kind enough to share another piece of firearm history with us. The  Brazilian LAPA FA-03 was a prototype rifle built in the 1980s. It had a surprisingly modern design that reminds me of the VHS Bullpup (minus the picatinny rails which had not yet been invented). One nifty side-effect of its straight in-line design was that it could stand upright on its recoil pad! Ronaldo told me that the rifle was a technical success that performed flawlessly, but due to politics the project was sadly killed.

Ronaldo Olive wrote the following article for the 26 May 1984 issue of Jane’s Defence Weekly …

UPDATE: Our friends at Forgotten Weapons have more on this gun.

Many thanks to Ronaldo Olive for the photos, information and the article.