#Trials

The GWACS Armory/KE Arms lawsuit saga is set to continue well into 2023. For those who are out of the loop, GWACS Armory is suing KE Arms on the grounds that the KP-15 lower receiver violates certain NDA and trade secrets. If you’re interested in reading what has happened so far with this firearms industry lawsuit, we’ve provided several links down below to articles that should give you a good overview of what has happened so far.

Back near the end of July 2022, we reported to you from KE Arms that the company was being sued by GWACS Armory over alleged patent and IP theft in regards to the KE-Arms KP-15 Monolithic Polymer Lower. While KE Arms has been attempting to work towards a resolution with GWACS Armory, it seems that these efforts have failed and that this lawsuit will now go to trial. Russel Phagan of KE Arms recently reached out to us with a public statement on this development surrounding the ongoing lawsuit and we’ve posted it below for your convenience.

In one of its recent news releases, Kalashnikov Concern has announced that the Russian government will start testing the new AM-17 and AMB-17 compact assault rifles in 2018. Several Russian special service agencies including the Federal Protective Service (FSO) and Federal Security Service (FSB) as well as the Russian National Guard have expressed a high interest in these two firearms.

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.

1864: The British government adopts (American) Jacob Snider’s breech-loading conversion for the P-1853 musket, with first issue in 1866. It uses a cutting-edge brass cartridge.

Today, a variant of the Heckler & Koch HK416 rifle is the standard squad infantry automatic rifle (IAR) of the United States Marine Corps, as the M27. At one time in the mid-2000s, though, companies from Colt to LWRC competed against each other in a competition to see which weapon would be the the Corps’ choice to fill the role, supplanting the belt-fed M249 as the squad’s automatic fire support capability. These weapons took a variety of approaches to meeting the USMC’s needs, from the constant recoil Ultimax MG, to the heat-sink equipped Colt IAR, to the open bolt full auto, closed bolt semiauto LWRC IAR. Ultimately, simplicity won out, and Heckler & Koch’s quite unambitious HK416-derived entry was selected to be the M27.

As you know, Russia hasn’t yet made a final decision which one of the new AK-12 and AEK-971 assault rifles to adopt. Both firearms are being extensively tested and issued in small quantities and both seem to be adequate to be adopted.

Following close on the heels of our other articles about the development and use of the AKS74U “Krinkov”, we now bring to TFB an article specifically about the prototypes that were entered into the design competition, that would later turn into the standardized AKS74U. Many of these did not see any sort of service after the competition, but they were extremely interesting and innovative designs that were indicative of forward thinking when it came to small arms technology in the 1970s. To put things in a competing design perspective with the M16, there wasn’t any long lasting successfully standardized extremely short version of the M16A2 from that time period. Of course there prototypes and limited fielding, but none of these came close to the sheer numbers of production and usage that the AKS74U saw in Afghanistan in the 1980s (as a result of the trials in the 1970s). The M4 really didn’t start getting into full issue until the late 1990s, and before that it was the CAR15, a somewhat perfected carbine that really only saw use among American special operations forces and some select few government agencies.

As our regular readers have by now guessed, early selfloading rifle design is a major point of interest for me. It’s not well-known, but before the US entrance into World War I, Ordnance was extremely interested in procuring a self-loading rifle design to arm US troops in combat. A significant round of tests followed as a result, and between 1910 and 1917, the US government tested designs from Standard Arms Co, Dreyse, Kjellman, Benet-Mercie, Rock Island Arsenal, Bang, Mauser, Mondragon, Rychiger, St. Etienne (what would become the RSC 1917), Stergian, and Liu, at least. One other rifle tested during this period was the Bommarito rifle, on which Forgotten Weapons has posted an article with description and photos.