#M1Rifle

The American M1 Garand was the world’s first general issue semi-automatic rifle. It is famous for many reasons (such as the harmonious ping it makes when ejecting its en bloc clip), but it is a magnificent piece of engineering that you can only truly appreciate by seeing what’s inside.

Some guns just seem to attract the most ravenous fanboys. These fanatics collaborate and overtime form cult-like cells within the community of firearm enthusiasts. In this video we explore five firearms that have developed a fan base akin to cults, often bordering on outright religious behavior.

If you read the previous two installments on how to order from the CMP, then you have a good idea about how to get eligible, fill out your paperwork, and send in your packet for a Field- or Service-Grade M1 Garand rifle. Now what? Once the waiting is done, and your rifle arrives at your doorstep, you have received a shiny new example of Patton’s “deadliest rifle in the world”.

This time last year, the Denver Post collected a series of color images taken during the D-Day landings that occured 71 years ago today. Some of the images are reproduced below, but our readers are strongly urged to click through and take a look at every one:

In preparation for an upcoming article about “light rifle” development (i.e., full power automatic infantry rifles), I have been reading the excellent Collector Grade Publication three-part volume on the FN FAL rifle. In it is contained the transcript of the 1950 Light Rifle trials, which pitted the American T25 design (a rifle that was at once a hybrid of the M1 Garand and BAR, but at the same time much more than that) by Earle Harvey, the Anglo-Polish EM-2 design by Stefan Janson, and the Anglo-Belgian FN FAL design – by none other than Dieudonné Saive, John M. Browning’s Belgian protégé – against the Second World War veteran the M1 Garand. The tests were comprehensive, but not all included the “control” rifle – the M1. Why this was so is not clear to me. In the rain tests, the M1 beat the EM-2 and was not so far behind the FAL and T25, and in the cold tests the M1 was a clear winner, functioning flawlessly (this would be echoed later when the T44E2 would beat the FAL in trials in Alaska, preventing its cancellation and eventually leading to the adoption of its descendant, the T44E4 as the M14, in 1957).

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?

In my critique of the M1 Garand rifle on Sunday, I noted that John Cantius Garand was not only a firearms designer, but a machinist as well. It was his intimate understanding of the world of the shop floor that made his rifle economical to produce, which is in my opinion by far the most outstanding attribute of the weapon.