Machine Guns

by David Crane One of DefRev’s members, "dewatters", has commented on our story below, "Demonstration Video: U.S. Ordnance M60E4/MK43 Mod. O 7.62mm Machine Gun", regarding the M60E4’s perceived reliability problems. The following is a copy of a document that was originally sent to DefRev’s editor-in-chief(yours truly) on 10/18/02 by Dale McClellan, Executive Vice President of Special Tactical Services (STS). It …

by David Crane The FN M240B 7.62mm GPMG is the current official 7.62mm machine gun for the U.S. Armed Forces, and is generally considered by many small arms experts to be a masterpiece in terms of small arms design. Masterpiece or not, the FN M240 GPMG, at 27 lbs EMPTY, is simply WAY too heavy for mobile infantry unit gunners …

by David Crane Heckler & Koch (HK) is currently developing a new 5.56x45mm belt-fed LMG(Light Machine Gun)/SAW(Squad Automatic Weapon). It’s called the MG43. The HK MG43 represents HK’s desire to compete against the FN M249 SAW on the world market. The HK MG43 LMG/SAW is, from all reports so far, not select-fire. It only has two settings, "Safe" and "Full-Auto". …

by David Crane defrev (at) gmail (dot) com May 6, 2003 Several months ago, DefRev attended the AUSA 2003 Winter Symposium (Feb. 26-28). During the show, we ran into the fine people at IMI (Israel Military Industries), and got a chance to handle their Tavor assault rifle variants, the Tavor TAR-21 Commando Carbine (shortened version of the Tavor assault rifle, …

by David Crane david@defensereview.com DefRev recently published a story on the Arms Tech Compak-16 subcarbine, which contained a video clip of DefRev editor-in-chief David Crane firing the weapon. The story was titled "Arms Tech Compak-16 Subcarbine at SWAT Round-Up 2002. First Time Video!". DefRev now has pics of the Compak-16 sales brochure. Click here to view the front page of …

U.S. Ordnance, out of Reno Nevada, is now manufacturing and distributing(under license from Saco Defense) an updated compact version of the now classic M60 GPMG (General Purpose Machine Gun). Called the M60E4/M43 Mod. 0, the new compact 7.62x51mm machine gun, according to the company, "represents… significant reliability and user-friendly improvements over the M60, M60D, M60E3 machine guns." Combat training and …

O.k, here’s the second installment highlighting the excellent "AK Mania" issue of SAR(Small Arms Review), Nov., 2002. By the way, this is a really great AK issue for all those Kalashnikov lovers out there. In this DefRev installment, we’re going to discuss ASD Firearms LLC’s authentic-looking AK variants, both full-auto and semi-auto only. The SAR story we’ll be discussing this …

by David Crane defrev@gmail.com September 03, 2002 Well, the folks at Leitner-Wise Rifle Co., of Alexandria, VA, have certainly been keeping busy over there. They’ve just come out with two new weapon systems speciifically geared for military Spec-Ops and LE tactical use. We’ll start with the Leitner Wise LW15.499 Mini-.50(or .499), a.k.a. Multi-Level Threat Response System (MLTRS). As this is …

The QBZ-95 bullpup infantry rifle from China, a.ka. Type 95 rifle, fires the proprietary 5.8x42mm round. Many small arms experts consider the ideal infantry/light machine gun caliber to be between 6mm and 6.5mm in diameter, and between 39mm and 45mm in length, making the new Chinese caliber very close to the ideal dual-purpose infantry round. Click here for pics and …

DefRev readers may remember a heads-up we posted a little while back on this weapon, before it even really had a name. Well, it does now. It’s called the SR-47, and it’s Knight’s Armament’s 7.62x39mm answer to the Kalashnikov AK-47/AKM. The ergonomics on this weapon are terrific(your humble editor had the opportunity to handle one at Shot Show 2002 in …