#Ii

In the early summer of this year,  a car-full of gun nerds set out to capture the rare Pedersen rifle on camera for the first time. The passenger with the van Dyke mustache and ponytail had just mentioned how if he could own any machine gun, it would be an StG.44, the German assault rifle of the second World War. Upon this, the driver, a tall, blonde Texan in cowboy boots, rebounded that one of the other passengers was the only person he’s ever met who wasn’t impressed with the German ur-sturmgewehr, which caused a great deal of whiplash to the others as their heads spun around to look in surprise and incredulity at the overweight one with the unkempt beard and brown mop of hair.

In the early 1980s, German gunmaker Heckler & Koch began to design a new submachine gun that would improve on the existing MP5, in response to a US Navy solicitation for an advanced submachine gun as part of the Joint Services Small Arms Program (JSSAP). The SMG I, which was the product of this development, is not the focus of this article, so instead I’ll refer readers to the HKPro article on the weapon: