At the end of the 1890s, John Moses Browning was in a weird place. He’d had a hand in designing many classic lever-action rifles (and even shotguns!) over the past years, but he realized that without some big changes to the design, lever-actions would lose a lot of market share to bolt acti...
Welcome to today’s Photo of the Day! Here we have Winchester doing the last thing you’d expect Winchester to do. This is the Winchester-Hotchkiss 1879 First Model, a bolt-action rifle from the company that owned the lever-action world. The Army wanted single-shots and never warmed to ...
Welcome to today’s Photo of the Day! Here we have a quality little rifle from a company that barely existed. This is the Kodiak Model 260, built up in North Haven, Connecticut by an outfit that was only in business from about 1963 to 1966 (and went by “Jefferson” before that). S...
Welcome to today’s Photo of the Day! Here we have a hunting rifle built on a very familiar skeleton. This is the Universal Firearms Vulcan 440, made down in Hialeah, Florida in the mid-1960s. Universal earned its keep building commercial copies of the M1 Carbine from surplus and new parts, ...
Welcome to today’s Photo of the Day! Here we have the most unusual lever gun Winchester ever built, and one a lot of folks have never handled. This is the Winchester Model 88, introduced in 1955, the first all-new lever-action Winchester had designed in roughly 60 years, and it threw out al...
Welcome to today’s Photo of the Day! Here we have a rare miss from a company that doesn’t miss much. This is the Benelli B77, the .32 ACP member of Benelli’s short-lived run at the handgun market in the late 1970s and 80s. You know Benelli for shotguns, and there’s a reaso...
Welcome to today’s Photo of the Day! Here we have H&K answering a question nobody at the factory had planned for. This is the USP Match in .45 ACP. The base USP showed up in the mid-90s as H&K’s big polymer service pistol, built mostly with the American market in mind and shar...
Welcome to today’s Photo of the Day! Here we have where it all started for one of the biggest names in guns. This is the Heckler & Koch HK4, the very first pistol H&K ever built. By the early 1960s they’d made their name turning the roller-locked CETME into the G3 battle rifle...
Welcome to today’s Photo of the Day! Here we have one of the stranger things to roll out of Italy in the 1980s. This is the SITES Spectre HC, the semi-auto pistol version of the Spectre M4 submachine gun built in Turin. The full-auto original was made for close-quarters work, VIP protection...
Welcome to today’s Photo of the Day! Here we have a Cobray/SWD Terminator single shot open bolt shotgun manufactured 1986 to 1988, marked for both 20 and 12 gauge with 2.75-inch chambers and cylinder choke. The open bolt design is the main thing here. The bolt sits rearward until you pull the...