#SubmachineGun

When I was a kid the Thompson sub machine gun was one of my favorite guns. It just looked cool in those old gangster and WWII movies with the drum mag and the foregrip. Unfortunately I’ll probably never own a real Thompson sub machine gun, they’re a bit out of my price range. If you’re in the market for one the Tuscarawas County Sheriff’s office in Ohio will be auctioning off a Thompson Model 1921 that they’ve had in their possession for 83 years.

PPSh-41 submachine gun was the main SMG of the Soviet Union during the WW2. It was cheap to make and was deployed in large numbers. It was also chambered in 7.62x25mm Tokarev, which means it shared the same ammunition as the handgun and the same caliber/bore as pretty much all the WW2 small arms of Soviet Union. The relatively controllable high rate of fire (about 1000 rpm) coupled with the 71-round drum magazine and high-velocity cartridge proved to be pretty successful on the battlefields of the war. In this article, we’ll take a look at some rare, prototype and experimental versions of the PPSh SMG. The list below goes in no particular order.

Shooting subsonic ammunition in a properly suppressed host is a real eye opening event for the uninitiated. My first suggestion to anyone jumping into the silencer world is to pick a gun that can reliably run ammo specifically loaded to stay at around 1050 feet per second (or less). That could mean a .22LR bolt action rifle or a .300 Blackout short barreled AR15. But when it comes to pistol caliber hosts, submachine gun or pistol caliber carbines, especially the H&K roller delayed/locked varieties, are unmatched for quiet semiautomatic fun. The Dead Air team is launching a new subgun silencer into the market – the Wolf-9SD promises rugged modularity alongside expert level suppression.

What do you get when you take the venerable speedster 7.62 Tokarev, and load it with a muzzleloader-style sabot and 50gr .22 cal projectile? You get one of the most interesting pistol, submachine gun, and personal defense weapon ammunition concepts there is!

It has been a little while since we visited the subject of modern personal defense weapon calibers, so to start it off again we’ll be taking a look at a new high velocity round that is only a few years old: Armscor’s .22 TCM. This round was reportedly developed by Fred Craig as a high velocity caliber for the 1911 platform, and picked up by Philippine company Armscor. Originally called the “.22 Mini Mag”, the .22 TCM (Tuason-Craig Magnum, after Craig and Armscor’s president) is designed to fit inside the magazine well of a 1911 and function from .38 Super 1911 magazines. Although a pistol round, the .22 TCM is based off the .223 Remington case, shortened by about three quarters of an inch. Thanks to the thick web of its parent case, the .22 TCM is capable of handling high pressures of 40,000 PSI. A version with a shortened projectile, the .22 TCM 9R, is compatible with shorter 9mm magazines for weapons like the Glock 17.

The Sten machine carbine was one of the most hastily completed and most expediently made submachine gun of the Second World War. Although it was reliable, a number of users didn’t like it simply because they saw it as a cheap pipe gun created as a last ditch effort. Nonetheless, there were a number of suppressed versions of it, two of the most prominent featured here, the Mk. II(S) and the Mk.VI with the wooden stock and furniture. Initially, the first suppressed version created for SOE was a Mk. II with a suppressor that was 22 inches in length, horribly heavy and unwieldy for the operations that the British clandestine service found themselves in most of the time.

I know that I am not going to make any friends by writing this, but that never stopped me before, so why not? Here goes: Pistol caliber carbines don’t make a whole lot of sense for the American rifle buyer, or at least not most of the offerings on the market right now.

It is not only the West that has developed small caliber, high-velocity pistol-compatible personal defense weapon ammunition; in the early 1990s, the People’s Republic of China also developed such a round. Called the 5.8x21mm DAP-92, it fires an 0.229″ caliber dual steel/lead cored bullet at a nominal 1,738 ft/s from the QCW-05 (Type 05) SMG, or 1,574 ft/s from the QSZ-92 handgun. It is shorter and less powerful than either the 5.7x28mm FN or the 4.6x30mm HK, making it a more suitable round for use in handguns than its Western counterparts.

The Sterling L2A3 was the iconic Cold War submachine gun of the British Army. Inexpensive to make, compact and rugged, it was a design that incorporated the experience from the Sten submachine gun, a weapon which though inexpensive really left a lot to be desired. In a recent video, Ian from Forgotten Weapons and working in concert with Armament Research Services (ARES), produced a video overview of some of the British developments in submachine guns (which they called “machine carbines”) just before, during, and after World War II. These designs helped pave the way for the Sterling, which saw service all the way through the Gulf War until its retirement in 1994.

One potential solution to the problem of a suitable anti-armor pistol and submachine gun round is to take the existing ammunition system and introduce one or more new kinds of ammunition which provide additional armor piercing capability through higher muzzle velocity and tougher core material. This is the route taken in Russia, where in the mid-1990s was introduced several loads for the Western 9x19mm caliber, as well as a new but fairly conventional round, the 9x21mm, also with optional AP load.

Quick: What’s the definition of “assault rifle”? I’ll give you a moment to think about it.

Since we’ve discussed the .30 M1 Carbine caliber, it is probably only a matter of time before someone mentioned another .30 caliber round used by the Allies during the Second World War, that being the 7.62x25mm Tokarev. The round is a turbocharged derivative of the 7.63 Mauser, itself a hopped up variant of the very first successful rimless pistol cartridge, the 7.65 Borchardt. It was adopted in 1930 by the new Soviet Russian government for use with the Tokarev TT pistol, and later was also used in the PPD-40, PPSh-41, and PPS-43 submachine guns. Outside of Russia, it has been a popular cartridge as well, being used by the Vietnamese, Czechs, Yugoslavs, and most notably, the Chinese (with whom it remains in service today).

It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these Modern PDW Calibers installments, but we’re back, and today we’re looking at a very new round on the market, one that is currently making some pretty big waves in the pistol world. I am talking of course about the 7.5x27mm FK Brno, designed for the CZ-75-derived FK Field Pistol from the company that shares its name. A high velocity .30 cal pistol round is not a new idea, having predecessors in the .300 JAWS, 7.62×25 Tokarev, and others, but what makes the 7.5 FK so interesting is just how powerful it is: A 103 grain monolithic bullet is advertised as leaving the 6″ Field Pistol barrel at an incredible 2,000 ft/s! This means that, if the company’s performance claims are true, the FK Field Pistol is ballistically the equal of the old WWII-era M1 Carbine!

If you are a fan of the World War II German MP40 submachine gun and want to have one of your very own, you are pretty much out of luck unless you are willing to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for a transferable original. However, it has been possible to buy “trainer” replicas in .22 long rifle, made by German Sport Guns (GSG), which for many was as close as they could come to owning an original “Schmeisser” machine pistol.

The history of modern small arms is in part so fascinating because of how many firearms have been developed even in obscure circumstances, and how many of those obscure small arms still exist in museums and private collections around the world. Even though I make learning about obscure modern small arms my hobby, I am continually surprised by the new and unique weapons I uncover both on the Internet and in real-life excursions to some of the aforementioned collections.