#JohnC.Garand

Rock Island Auction seems to always have something special, but this particular item is exceptional even by those standards. Forgotten Weapons has a video overview of an extremely rare Pedersen GY rifle. This rifle was a Pedersen design from the late 1930s that copied its entire mechanism from the M1 Garand rifle. John D. Pedersen, it seems, was not above acting on the old axiom “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”:

With the introduction of the successful metallic cartridge in the 1840s, an explosion of innovation directed towards rapid-firing infantry weapons rocked the world. The culmination of this would be the mass-produced self-loading rifle, realized with the adoption of the Garand in 1933, its standardization in 1936, and eventually its mass production after 1939. However, the Garand was far from the first self-loader ever devised; many know of the Mexican-Swiss Mondragon rifle, but even earlier than that were the Cei-Rigotti of 1898, the STA series of rifles from France beginning in 1896, and the Madsen-Rasmussen of 1888, to name a few. Many of these early rifles worked fairly well, even; the Madsen-Rasmussen, Mondragon , RSC 1917, Mauser Selbstlader, and several other weapons were successful enough to be adopted in some capacity by military forces. Why, then, did the world have to wait until the late 1930s to finally realize the standard-issue selfloading rifle?