#FirearmsHistory

Photo Of The Day: There is just one photo today, but considering what’s in it, there should be enough for long discussions. There is no exact date when it was taken, but the guess is that sometime between the end of ’77 and ’79.

Welcome to the TFB Podcast Roundup 4. I recently took a trip out to Wyoming to do some prairie dog hunting and while my time out there was phenomenal, I was unfortunately stuck for many hours inside of the increasingly unbearable air transit system. Thankfully, this gave me plenty of time to reach out and discover a few new podcasts that I hadn’t encountered before. To my surprise, I actually got to meet up with one of the hosts from this week’s podcasts and gleaned a lot of invaluable information from him. So to my friend Paul G. Markel of Student of the Gun – thanks for all the info!

If I asked you what the first first bullpup rifle was, what would you answer? The Steyr AUG? British EM-2 from the 1950s? The Faucon ‘Balanced Rifle’ from 1911 or maybe the Thorneycroft carbine from the early 1900s?

The late 1800s and early 1900s are undoubtedly a period of American firearms design dominated by one man, John Moses Browning. But many of Browning’s contemporaries were no less able and men like Andrew Burgess, William Mason, John Pedersen, Frank Burton and T.C. Johnson were all responsible for ingenious and important designs.

Carpet sellers in Afghanistan call it a “Tup-e-Tung” in Dari, or what we know of in the United States as the “Afghan War Rug” in popular conception. This style of carpet initially became prevalent among tribal Baluchi women who weaved low profile designs into their carpets to signify the Soviet invasion and occupation thereafter beginning in December of 1979. The designs became more overt and wide spread after numerous years and started gaining interest among foreign buyers for their unique character displaying the Soviet occupation. The carpets themselves are a break from traditional Afghan carpet weaving. Afghan carpets are mostly based on certain designs or themes that are named after their designs or locales that they originated from. These don’t depict scenes or objects like the Tup-e-Tung carpets do, but instead intricate designs. In fact, Tup-e-Tungs are unique in that they are the only type of Afghan (or Persian/Iranian for that matter) carpet that portrays specific objects or people on the scale that they do.

Mike Beliveau has uploaded an interesting guest video on his Duelist1954 channel. Alexander Spiridonov, a Russian engineer and black powder scholar, explains how Europe’s earliest firearms worked in battle.

The multi-lug rotating bolt as used in a number of semi-automatic firearms today has a significant number of advantages over numerous other designs, to include tilt locking or blowback operated mechanisms. Ability to unlock becomes easier than a standard two lug design, the forces on the lugs are much more evenly distributed, even if one lug does shear off, this might not affect the others during a course of fire. But what are the origins of this design feature that is seen in almost every modern day semi-automatic weapon? Stoner is rightly credited with bringing the concept to fruition, but where did he get it from? Many say Stoner was inspired by Melvin Johnson, but this episode will show that there is actually an 1800s design that features almost identical aspects of the current Stoner piece.

In Fairfax, VA, tucked away among other unassuming office buildings is the NRA’s headquarters. A twin-towered office building, it doesn’t look like what you’d expect the site of one of the most important collections of small arms in the world to look like. While traveling back home for the holidays, though, I made it a point to head over to the National Firearms Museum there and spend several hours looking at their collection, which is truly impressive. Before we move on, I must admit I am a decided novice at photography. For the NFM this is not so great a vice, since in my opinion one can only really appreciate their collection in person, (and the lighting of many displays, while great for display, was not well-suited to general photography), and because the NRA has high-resolution photos of the Petersen Collection available on their website.