#Burst

In today’s episode, we follow Miles to Shot Show 2018 and visit the Knight’s Armament booth.

Recently on The Firearm Blog we talked about one of the great might-have-beens, the German caseless G11 rifle developed by Heckler & Koch during the 1970s and 1980s. Today we have a video from 1990 filmed at Aberdeen Proving Grounds of a demonstration of the G11K2 on the firing range.

In the world of “might-have-been” small arms, a world of .276 Garands and NATO-standard EM-2s, none flew so high nor fell so far as the Heckler & Koch G11 caseless hyperburst assault rifle. Designed to out-match any contemporary small arm in a Cold War shootout across Central Europe, the G11 combined the aesthetics of a scifi plasma rifle with complexity of a Swiss watch. The result was a bullpup caseless wunderwaffe with a 2,000 round per minute hyperburst setting, and a price tag that, as the joke goes, compared unfavorably with reconstructing East Germany.

Hognose, over at his blog Weaponsman.com, has written a tidy rundown of the past, present (and probable lack of a) future for burst-limited automatic small arms. A sample, and further discussion, is below, but I encourage my readers to click through and read his article first, then continue on:

Most military members take the arcane workings of their rifle for granted. Even an avid shooter myself, I was NEVER allowed to do maintenance on my M-16 fire control group while I was in the Corps. While some might argue this is a good thing considering that many members of the military are not interested in firearms, I firmly believe that everyone should know their weapon inside and out – especially if there is an issue.

Polenar Tactical went to Grand Power, in Slovakia, and got to test fire some of their pistols. One of them has a two rd burst and another goes to 11 with full auto. For those not familiar with Grand Power, they use a rotating barrel similar to Beretta’s PX4 storm pistols. I did see a Grand Power semi auto pistol at the range in Brno, Czech Republic, but did not get to shoot it. The K105 is the full auto version. Here is a link to their website.

Though I’m spending most of my time this Saturday hitting a stack of thick books as part of my ongoing research, I wouldn’t want to leave our readers hanging. So, today we’ll take a look at an older – but still extremely impressive – video from back in the dawn of YouTube. That is, an excruciatingly brutal 2006 test of an M60E4 of firing 850 rounds with a single pull of the trigger:

Jerry Miculek is at it again with the unicorn guns. This time he gets to try out a FN CAL. It is designed like the FAL but is chambered in 5.56. The selector switch is very interesting. It of course has safe, semi and full auto but it also has a 3 round burst. And according to Reed Knight, the FN CAL has a sort of “clock escapement mechanism” that resets the 3 round burst. So if the shooter lets off after the first or second round in a 3 round burst, the gun will reset it self to fire another 3 round burst at the next trigger pull.