#Williams

In January, just before the 2017 SHOT Show, I got the opportunity to travel to Cody Wyoming to visit the Cody Firearms Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, to see some of their rare firearms and bring photos of them to our readers. The folks at the Cody Museum were tremendously helpful in getting high quality pictures of the weapons in their collection, and so I’d like to give a big “thank you” to Ashley and Danny!

While the Garand was hailed by Patton as the “best” battle implement ever to hit the field, there arguably were better implements proposed to replace it. While the Johnson & Peterson designs typically gets the most attention, the Winchester company also threw its hat into the ring with the G30M, a weapon originally designed by a Browning… Jonathan “Ed” Browning, that is.

As it often happens, the exploits of a team of talented individuals is often attributed to that of one person. In a good example, many think of Eugene Stoner as the inventor of the AR-15, which is largely true (though some would argue that Jim Sullivan and the team had a significant amount of input). On the opposite side, its not the case with David Marshall “Carbine” Williams who is attributed design credit on the M1 carbine. Turns out that he was quite distant from the project.

What if the Mini-14 had arrived over a decade earlier, and been a pound lighter? Would it have still played second-fiddle to the AR-15, or would US troops be using classically-lined rifles of wood and steel right up until today? Was there really an alternative to the “Buck Rogers” space-gun-like AR-15 in the late 1950s and early 1960s?