In not so sunny England the land from the high tide line to the sea has traditionally been crown land and thus available for recreational shooters to go hunting on. Although that might not initially sound greatly promising there are parts of England where the area of land down from the high tide mark can ...

The story of the Parker brothers begins well before the American Civil War. Charles Parker was involved in manufacturing by the 1830's and opened his first factory in 1834. At that stage they were not yet making firearms however but small utility items that included waffle irons, door knockers and coffee grinders. The company progressively ...

Darne guns and rifles are made with a unique sliding breech mechanism operated by a "T" lever at the top of the breech. Lifting the "T" lever slides the wedge shaped breech block to the rear ejecting the fired cartridges and providing a clear space to drop another couple of cartridges in. These are unusual ...

Those of us with grey hair likely still remember that the number "486" was used for an Intel CPU chip that preceded the Pentium. For the Beretta 486 Parallelo however this does not mean that the shotgun had a computer chip in it but that it celebrates 486 years of Beretta making guns. Back in ...

Sometimes people do things that seem OK at the time but discover later on that the action produces long term consequences that were not envisaged and that cause major problems. This was the case for Winchester in their relationship with John Moses Browning. Although Browning had done some work for Winchester designing a number of ...

John and Tom Wilkes closed their shop located just off London's busy Regent's Street, at 79 Beak Street, in 2003. The shop later became an art gallery appropriately called "The Riflemaker" for John Wilkes was both rifle and gunmaker, and an artist in the best London gun tradition whilst Tom was the business manager. In ...

I suspect that it is the secret desire of almost every gun enthusiast to have the opportunity to fire a Thompson sub-machine gun. Winston Churchill was one who was given that opportunity, but there are a lot of others of us just waiting in line. The Thompson sub-machine gun is something of an enigma. It ...

The name of W.W. Greener is one of the best known in English gunmaking. William Wellington Greener was the son of William Greener who was a famous gunmaker and inventor who made guns for Prince Albert, the Prince Consort of Queen Victoria during the golden years of the British Empire. Amongst W.W. Greener's contributions to ...