- Joined
- Mar 12, 2021
Hah. Can't fully agree with that though, the Webley and Enfield revolvers were good, the Webley automatic seems like it was very promising and probably would have caught on if not for the war. The Sten is a pipegun, but that's what you get when the goal is quantity, quantity, quantity, the Sterling is good, very nice magazine.
The Bren isn't all theirs, it's mostly from BRNO, but they did put in the work to adapt it to their tapered and rimmed rifle cartridge, and designed a fucking good magazine to go with it, it's probably the best magazine fed light machinegun of the war, the Berthier light machinegun is basically comparable.
The PIAT is the anti-tank pipegun, or rather, the Sproing Mortar, and it's fucking hilarious, but what's more amazing is that the thing (mostly) fucking works, even if you have to get unpleasantly close (mind, Germans had to as well with early iterations of the Panzerfaust).
That leaves the Enfield, which isn't as sick as a Garand or a shiny new Sturmgewehr, but most everyone else had a bolt-action rifle loaded with clips, and theirs was pretty much the best in that category.
Then you have the FAL, Hi-Power, and FN Mag, which were licensed copies, but all built properly and of high quality. I think they just let their military industrial complex slowly rot during the Cold War.
My primary example, because the design and concept is, well, it's not perfect, but it was perfectly workable, it should have gone fine, but they ditched the people who actually developed it so they could hire recent engineering grads for cheap to develop it for mass production, which is the stage where the SA80 actually got brundlefucked.
Now look at the AWM, same era, but rather than coming from the British military industrial complex, it came from the private sector, famously two Daves in a shed who were pals with a champion marksman, and their rifle was really fucking good. So, at least by that time the British still had it in them, even if not in all the government institutions or big contractors.
Considering how Pylon, who were sub-contracted to produce rifles for Accuracy International's contract, blatantly tried to fuck them, one wonders how many other possible small time innovators or startups were getting stepped on by that system, before the laws were even fully cucked.
I'm convinced that, if all their gun laws magically vanished tomorrow, once you looked past the liberal bleating and the wailing of soccer moms, you would absolutely see a lot of tinkerers building tube guns in their sheds and basements with big grins on their faces, people converting their cope straight pulls into the rifles they were supposed to be, and quite a few sketching on an idea they had for a product which previously wasn't legal.
You can never truly eradicate that sort of ambition.
As I said before, the channel is a kid's show with guns, Whatshisname has a good on screen persona for appealing to kids.
That there's kids shows about guns is one of those things about this future which is actually cool, that'd have been completely unthinkable back in my day.
