#MachineGuns

Lithuania’s Defence Materiel Agency has selected FN’s 7.62x51mm Minimi Mk3 to replace the KSP-58 (and other FN MAG variants) and MG3s currently in service. The same announcement stated that a new order for Carl Gustaf recoilless rifle ammunition had been made.

One of the best parts of the SHOT Show is being able to get hands on with some really interesting firearms. This year was no different with Heckler & Koch, to my surprise, displaying their belt-fed machine guns: the MG4 and MG5. While I don’t think we’ll be seeing these on the commercial market any time soon, it was great to get to handle them in person.

Welcome back to another Friday Night Lights. Last week I posted about some hidden night vision related gems at SHOT Show 2023. TFB in the Dark returns with full auto M16s, night vision and other machine gun night vision shoots during SHOT Show. There were four night shoots last week including the TFB staff shoot. Let’s see what people played with in the dark.

On 3 July, the ranges at Bisley, the UK’s historic home of shooting, hosted a very special shoot. Vickers Machine Guns fired 16,000 rounds of ammunition with a crowd of nearly 1,000 people gathered to watch. It had been 20 years since the last time this many Vickers Guns had fired together. The event was held to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the disbandment of the Machine Gun Corps – the British Army’s corps of expert machine gunners formed in 1916 which disbanded in July 1922.

Machine guns make just about every red-blooded American happy. However, access and opportunities to this type of equipment are something that is often difficult to attain for most of us. Local gun ranges often have full-auto rentals for the occasional blast of fun but events like the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot allowed people to not only watch many of their favorite machine guns in action but also join in on the show by taking part themselves in the firing line. Sadly, last year’s Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot was the last one to ever take place. However, today I bring you all a little bit of hope. Today on the show I have with me Rapid Fire Rachel and her father Anonymous Bob. The two of them together are gearing up for what should be an event that will scratch your machine gun shoot itch. Today on the TFB Podcast we talk about this, as well as a bit about both Bob and Rachel and what they love most about shooting and firearms.

Ukraine is converting salvaged Russian PKT machine guns for ground use. There appears to be a car repair shop in Kyiv which is taking in captured and salvaged Russian tank machine guns and adapting them for ground use with an ad-hoc stock and pistol grip assembly. Fascinating ingenuity, but not without historical precedence.

When normal people hear the word “smart gun”, the first thing they usually think of is the guns that require either a fingerprint or some sort of wrist band that allows only that user to shoot it (in theory). However, when cinephiles and hoplophiles hear the same term, only one gun comes to mind – the M56 Smart Gun from the 1986 movie Aliens. In a recent YouTube video I came across from user  KetzuKhan, it seems that he’s managed to cobble together his very own working M56 Smart Gun replica.

One of the biggest hurdles for most people when it comes to buying a suppressor (aside from the high upfront cost) is the fact that suppressors or other ATF Form 4 items usually take somewhere between 6-months to over a year to get back approved. For many, this means that their hard spent cash is sitting in a safe somewhere until a piece of paper with a stamp on it comes back to them almost a year later. However, according to Silencer Shop, the long waits seem to be over with the introduction of the ATF’s eForm process which Silencer Shop has seen bring back approved forms in as little as 6 days.

Maxim Defense is a fairly well-known company within the firearms industry and they are probably most well known for their development of suppressors, and more recently, their development of short-barreled rifle ammunition which tumbles upon impact to increase terminal performance. Today, TFB Editor in Chief has Travis Bundy on the show with him right from the SHOT Show 2022 floor to talk a bit about his history with Gemtech, his background in physics, and of course his work at Maxim Defense and what the company is currently working on for 2022.

A while back we sadly reported that the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot would have its final dates set for October of this year. Having never been to one previously, I really wanted to get out there and attempt to get the full experience. As most of you know, the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot was a yearly event that is basically half gun show and half machine gun range day. The event normally brings in tens of thousands of people but this being its final year, those previous attendance numbers were blown out of the water and gun enthusiasts from all across the country gathered to give the annual event a proper sendoff. Today I’ll share with you some of my experiences from the Last Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot and hopefully, this article will serve as a memoir to what has to be one of the most unique firearms events on the planet.

Hello and welcome back to another edition of The Rimfire Report. This ongoing series is all about the rimfire firearm world and its various firearms, ammunition, and technologies. This week we have a very interesting firearm I didn’t even know existed until fellow writer Doug E sent over a few snippets from  The Gun Digest Book of Assault Weapons 5th Edition. In this book, the Williams/Lisk 22 Rimfire is featured and marked as a design that never quite made it into production. The Williams/Lisk 22 Rimfire was basically an American 180 on steroids but in belt-fed form and I don’t know how you can’t have fun with a belt-fed rifle especially when the ammunition is so inexpensive. So today we’ll dive into the Williams/Lisk 22 Rimfire and see what the impetus was for its invention and also why it never quite made it to the production stage of its life and is now all but a forgotten memory of the firearm world.

Few writers have the tenure and experience that Rusty S of TFB has. Rusty has been researching, reviewing firearms for a very long time and was brought on to the TFB team sometime in 2014. Today on the podcast, he and Pete discuss some pretty humorous situations regarding the end of the world as well as some of what Rusty does as a rancher, shooter, and lover of all things 2nd Amendment. Russ is the Editor of Outdoorhub.com which covers a variety of non-firearm-related topics like archery, outdooring, camping, adventuring, and fishing which Rusty does much of in his spare time. If you’d like to check out some of Rusty’s articles, you can follow this link here.

Aidan Johnston, Director of Federal Affairs for the GOA announced via his Twitter yesterday (June 25th, 2021) that the previous judgment regarding Gun Owners of America v. Garland has been vacated via a three-judge panel. This essentially means that the panel ruled that bump stocks are not machine guns. This is a victory for the 2nd Amendment community even if you’re not a fan of the bump stock. The battle determining the legality of bump stocks has been raging on for quite some time and the GOA has been working to restore these firearms accessories back to legal status as non-machineguns since they were first banned on March 26th of 2019.

Machine gun enthusiasts received a bit of bad news recently with a News Alert from Kenny Sumner – the owner of the Knob Creek Gun Range. This year’s October 2021 Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot will be the last one. The news was discovered via a picture of a printed and signed letter breaking the sad news – the end of the shoot. For years people have been coming to the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot to get the rare opportunity to shoot full-auto and other NFA firearms that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to get their hands on.

FN America have been awarded a $92 million contract by the US Army to produce M240 series general purpose machine guns. The firm fixed price contract awarded 8 June calls for an estimated completion date of June 2026. FN confirmed that the contract will cover M240 provisions not just for the US Army but also other Department of Defense programs.