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Private Notes
Gunsite Academy’s Cory Trapp is the armorer on Gun Stories and you have seen him in all the high speed videography scenes in season 1. Cory is back for season 2 and this time, you can also watch him weekly in our online exclusive where he and Michael Bane talk about the featured guns in each episode. This week, the topic is the S&W Model 29.
What was the gun that won the west? Was it the Winchester 73, the Colt Single Action Army or the Springfield Trapdoor? No, it was the one gun that any person could hunt with and use for self defense. It was the Double Barrel Shotgun.
Once in a blue moon, a machine becomes more than the sum of its parts. It is even more rare when that machine is a tool of war. in 1919, John Taliaferro Thompson, a career army officer, created the firearm that would make his name immortal.
The Pistole Parabellum 1908 or more simply the Luger, is as emblematic of the German empire as the slab sided 1911 is of America. Although it was not the first semi automatic pistol, the Luger’s early successes proved that as the 19th century gave way to the 20th, the semi auto pistol was a wave of the future.
As World War I began, the American dough boys needed a new machine gun. John Browning responded with his water cooled model 1917. When the war ended, Browning made a few changes to his signature design. What emerged was the air cooled Model 1919.
When we think of those things that are quintessential American, certainly apple pie comes to mind. Not far behind that delicious vision is a different image – one of long summer afternoons spent plinking with a beloved .22 rifle. And the rifle that embodies that image is the Ruger 10/22, a gun that has earned the name America’s Rifle.
It’s been said that the history of weapons is indeed the history of the world. Maybe a bit of an overstatement, but certainly true in the case of the Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947, the AK-47. I’s a rifle that has quite literary reshaped the world.
If ever a firearms could be said to have a inferiority complex, it would be the Remington Rolling Block rifle. Perhaps the most common rifle used by pioneers in America’s westward expansion, it lost out first to the Sharps and later the Winchesters and the critical arena of publicity. But the Rolling Block wrote its name in large letters across our western frontier.
Gunsite Academy’s Cory Trapp and Michael Bane talk about the Modern 1911 featured in episode #10 of Gun Stories season 2 on Outdoor Channel.
