[ Three Gun Myths with Bloke on the Range ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and this is Bloke on the Range.
And we are here hanging out today at Lynx Brutality in Slovenia.
A fantastic-looking match this year, run by Polenar Tactical.
And today is the staff match,
so we were sort of trying to help but they've got things pretty well squared away.
So we figured we'd come up here and record a video for you guys.
So what are we talking about today? - Well, the first time we did anything together
it was 2016 and we did
- That's true. - And we've been saying for ages that we'd like to do some more, so we've got some more.
- You are saying there are more annoying gun myths out there? - So many. - Shocking.
- Alright, so we've got three lined up for you guys today.
And our first one is: the AK is just a copy of the Sturmgewehr.
- Right? - Sigh. - It looks pretty much the same. - Yeah.
- Magazine is kind of curvy. - Yeah. - Got a wooden buttstock on the back. - Yeah.
- It's got sights that stick up off the top, like a lot. - Open rear sight.
- Cartridge is basically identical. - Mhm.
- I mean QED, boom! It's done! - Yeah, must be an absolute copy. - Right.
- Except it really, really isn't. There's more M1 Garand in it.
- That is the key thing. - That is the key thing, and Kalashnikov himself has admitted this.
Fundamentally it looks similar because it's a real form follows function thing.
I mean, basically you make a gas-operated (with a top piston) rifle like that
with a curvy mag, they are all going to look the same. - Yup.
- ... What's also a bit deceptive is that the Sturmgewehr 44 is huge compared to an AK-47.
- Yes it is. That is something that you don't get in video games,
you don't really appreciate until you actually pick one up. - Yeah.
- And you're like, wow! ... The Thompson's the same way. - Yeah.
- And the Sturmgewehr is heavier than you'd think as well. ...
- Oh, it's a very large thing, whereas an AK-47 is shorter than an M1 carbine.
... I was shocked when I saw that on a rack. - Wow, I never actually thought about it.
- I saw it on a rack, standard wood butt AK next to an M1 carbine and it's shorter.
- I mean the M1 carbine is just a hair under 18 inches barrel length, and the AK is 16.
- Yep. It's a tiny, tiny thing.
But once you've got the concept of the intermediate cartridge, the large magazine,
I mean a G3 looks like a FAL, mechanically there's ... no similarity
other than it's a gun with that kind of configuration.
- So technically speaking on the mechanics, the FAL has a tilting bolt. The bolt drops down to lock.
When the gas piston comes back, it's got these two hooks
that you can see clearly through the ejection port
and they just pick up the bolt, lift it out of its locking ... recess and cycle it back.
The AK has a rotating bolt like an M1.
And a trigger rather like an M1. - Yep.
And you know where a lot of the M1 stuff came from?
- Mmm? -
- The RSC has a lot of those same elements to it. - Mhm.
- So of course we can thus justifiably say that the French invented the AK.
Right? - I'm convinced. - OK.
Now the other part of that myth that always comes up is,
"Well the Russians captured all the German scientists.
So obviously the German scientists
(or in this case German engineers) are the ones who built the AK."
And at a superficial level it makes perfect sense, you've got guys who
designed a stamped sheet-metal intermediate-calibre modern assault rifle.
They go to Russia, what are they going to do? Obviously they are going to do that.
And that's what Russia comes out with, except that they don't really.
- It's a totally different receiver construction.
- Right. So when the AK is first developed ... the first AKs that come out have stamped receivers.
They are different than the AKMs we are used to today, because they didn't work.
They had a huge reject rate, they warped in heat treating, ... the project just didn't work.
It didn't work so badly that they reverted to a milled receiver until 1957,
when they finally got the kinks worked out of the stampings.
If they had used all of these vaunted experienced German engineers
to design the AK stamped receiver, they would have got it done sooner than 1957.
- Apparently the reject rate on the Sturmgewehr 44 was incredibly high as well.
- Yes it was. - But they just didn't care for whatever reason. - Right.
- Western manufacturing would never have tolerated that sort of just sheer wastage of material.
- I believe the big difference with the Sturmgewehr was that
the ... QC problems were happening earlier in the production phase.
The problem with the early AKs was they would get the stamped receiver
and weld it in place around the trunnions, and then that complete assembly would warp.
- Mhm. - At which point you are throwing away a lot of work.
With the Sturmgewehr the big problem was with the stampings.
Because it's such a complicated stamping, that a lot of the raw stampings
... had tears, or didn't work for whatever reason.
And at that point it's a lot less wastage, but yeah, it ... was 20+%.
- It was massive. - If I remember the numbers correctly. - And it's a complicated receiver with three parts.
Because you've got the hinged trigger mechanism, which you then see later
on the CETME and the G3, which is derived directly from that.
You've got the main upper receiver tube, again you see that through the CETME and the G3.
And the back piece that ties it all together.
Whereas the Type 1 AK is just this stamped and welded girder. - Yeah. - Essentially.
And it was a very simple design to rejig to the Type 2 and the Type 3 milled.
You couldn't mill a Sturmgewehr 44 receiver,
because ... the shape's all wrong, you don't want to start from here. - Right, yeah.
The reality of the fact is ... for the Russians the Kalashnikov project, the new assault rifle,
was absolutely top secret, a national security major weapons development program.
And that's not where they're going to stick all of the literal Nazis that they've captured.
They are going to put them on things that are a little less critical, and that's what they did.
They were working on other projects, and I can't remember now the details on all of them.
I actually have a video that I did with Max Popenker where we talk about some of this.
... There weren't actually a lot of these
really experienced German weapons engineers that went into Russia.
But the ones who did, ended up on projects that got scrapped.
- Yeah, yeah. Interestingly though, Type 1 AKs have been turning up in Ukraine.
- I'm not surprised, everything has been turning up in Ukraine. - On the Ukrainian side, it's incredible.
- This is not vodka. - Yeah. - Brilliant Polenar marketing thing.
Oh, this is vodka! This is going to get to be a real interesting video.
Alright, what is number two? - What are we going to do with number two?
Let's do the Mattel M16. - I've seen those. In fact I was issued one of those in Vietnam, I swear to you.
- You didn't do your basic on it?
- I totally get where this came from, the gun feels like a toy.
We are kind of used to it now, we don't think about it.
But if you go from an M14, and you open a crate
and you pull out an M16A1 that weighs like 6 pounds. - Woop!
You're like ... and it's plastic, it's not wood, some sort of newfangled plastic nonsense.
Yeah, it absolutely feels like a toy. - Yep, yep.
And fundamentally it's not true, but it's one of those myths that won't die.
I had in my comments, I had someone who was claiming to be a Colt engineer,
who said that Mattel made plastic parts, because they were good on fibre-reinforced plastic.
Because that's what he'd heard, or he heard it from a Colt armourer,
or whatever, he been told that at the factory or what have you.
If you go to Mattel's website of things they've worked on,
there's no mention of working with any of the M16 producers.
- And if you go through all of the documents about M16 development, Mattel had nothing to do with it.
And we were talking about this earlier this morning,
... the most telling piece of evidence to me
is that I can't find a Mattel-marked AR, or any Mattel AR part, on eBay for $1,000.
- Oh well, this guy, this supposed Colt armourer, had a reason for that.
It was embarrassing that people saw "Mattel" and thought it was a toy,
so they used a manufacturer code. - Right.
- There's lists of every single manufacturer code for nerds like us online.
- If ... Mattel had actually made M16 parts,
people would have by now figured out which ones they were,
and they would be selling for insane amounts of money.
And the hottest thing to do would be to clone-build a Mattel ... M16. - Yes.
There would be a Brownells retro Mattel with all the correct markings and everything.
- And it's not like manufacturer codes and secrecy actually work.
Like we know who all of those German manufacturers were from World War Two,
and that's after we bombed the crap out of all their records,
and they were actually trying to hide them for real, pretty well.
- Now there was the Mattel Marauder toy. - OK.
- And I've heard, and this is plausible, that these Mattel Marauder toys
weren't just used in that terrible, terrible John Wayne ... Vietnam film as props,
but ... that some units bought them as dummy rifles. I've heard that, and that is plausible.
And then you could easily see ... how the memories flow into each other.
And "We had a couple of Mattel Marauder dummy rifles that we used for something,"
and then it ended up as, "I was issued ... an M16 made 100% by Mattel in Vietnam.
And I have this like strong memory of all the markings on it." ... - Yeah.
- And then someone Photoshops one up and you get people going, "Oh my god, I knew it."
- There it is, there it is! It is a hilarious physical practical joke.
- Yeah. - Brilliant thing to do, but they weren't actually real. - No.
- Alright. And our third one is: the infamous lack of stopping power of the M1 carbine.
- Oh yes. - Which as we all know from the Korean War was infamous
for American GIs would shoot Chinese soldiers in their heavy-duty padded winter jackets
and they would like brush it off and walk right on towards you.
- And then the guy next to him with a Thompson would knock him down.
- Right, and that would do the job. - Yeah, which is like the opposite of Class 3 body armour.
Because .45 ACP is stopped very, very easily by Class 3 body armour,
and ... .30 M1 carbine goes through it like a knife through butter.
- Because it's got 2.5 times the velocity. - Yeah, and a smaller surface area, and things like that.
This is one that doesn't die. There's so many people who've done tests in freezing conditions
with simulacrums of thick clothing and things like that. It penetrates just fine.
- Yeah. - But it's an issue of you can't miss fast enough to win, given that we're in a match.
And the simple answer is they are missing.
I've seen some ... US Army documentation which noted the improved penetration
of the M1 carbine compared to .45 ACP because of problems in jungle.
- Right. - And .45 ACP is very wide and very slow. - Yeah.
- And it does not actually penetrate that well.
It's probably about the worst (I'm going to get hate for this)
it's probably about the worst submachine gun cartridge that you could come up with.
... Unless you were going to do something stupid like .455 Webley revolver.
- Or something really terribly underpowered. ... - Yeah.
- Yeah, the cartridges are really heavy, they're really big.
- Yeah. - .45 ACP mags are physically large and heavy. - Yup.
- And the trajectory is ... very rainbow like. - Yeah.
So yeah, the reality of the fact is precisely the opposite of the myth. - Yep.
- The .45 was the one that might potentially have problems. But let's be honest,
a .45 ACP is going to go right through a padded winter jacket just fine. - Yeah.
What you get are two things: one is guy slips, falls down,
or hears bullets whizzing by and drops to the ground. - Because they are supersonic.
- Yeah, oh yeah, you'll hear that snapping going by. 2,000 feet per second muzzle velocity.
And then gets up and brushes himself off briefly.
And what you see from the other end is,
"Oh, I shot him, and he just got right back up and brushed himself off."
And guys who just miss.
Like it's really easy under stress to miss and be darn sure that you hit.
Like this is why ... claimed kills of everything from infantry up to aircraft and tanks
are always exaggerated and inflated over the real numbers. - Yeah.
Because you can very honestly, legitimately, like, "I nailed that one,
a perfect shot, got that guy centre of mass. He went down, he stood right back up.
And the reality is no, you didn't actually, you missed.
Maybe you had your front sight ... protector wing in the aperture instead of your front sight post.
Or maybe you just ganked the trigger, or maybe you closed your eyes.
Maybe you are just not as good of a shot as you think you are.
- And we see this a lot at these matches (and these are not combat shooting,
this is a one-way range) they are stressful matches. You can think you've got everything lined up
and then something goes wrong and you are expecting to hear a ding, and no ding. - And no ding.
- And I can only imagine that it's 20,000 times worse in combat than just at a match.
- Yeah. But it is not about the stopping power of M1 carbine. - No.
- Or the amazing armour value of a padded winter jacket.
- The other thing is, because there was another .30 calibre cartridge
that was common on the Korean War battlefield, 7.62x25 used in PPSh 41s and PPS-43s.
Nobody ever claims that that lacked stopping power.
- Never! No, that's the fantastic amazing pistol cartridge that might as well be a rifle.
That's going 25% slower than M1 carbine with a lighter bullet. - Much lighter bullet. Yeah.
86 grains at 1,500 to 1,600 feet per second, let's be generous to it.
As opposed to 110 at 2,000 feet per second. - Yeah.
It's like, that's folk physics. - Yeah.
- M1 carbine has a substantial amount of energy. - Yes.
- It feels underpowered and wimpy if you put down a BAR and pick up an M1 carbine.
The reality of the fact is that the .30-06 is a massively overpowered cartridge.
- Yeah. And you see why they were popular on the battlefield when they started to come in.
- Absolutely. - The Brits used them as well in the Far East in World War Two and later.
And unless it's one that's not running right. - Yeah.
- An M1 carbine that runs well is excellent, and you see why everyone wanted to get their hands on them.
- Yeah. - ... I've done a video shooting one that isn't in great condition,
but that's what happens when you buy sight unseen online.
I had to get the barrel tightened right because it had been over-torqued.
But ... you wouldn't want to stand that accurate at 300. - Yeah. - Which is absolutely fine.
And it's still being picked up by the acoustic detection on our targets at 300. - OK.
- So it will detect the shot, that was a big question.
And I was like, "Yeah, I can hit it, and we can more or less keep them in the figure."
- Nice. That's impressive at 300. - Which is impressive.
So the rifle itself can do that for that up to 300 battle space.
- Yeah. ... Well, I'm sure all of you guys who are watching knew that all three of those were myths.
But pass the video on to your friends who still claim that any of those three things are in fact true.
Your channel is
You and your buddy, the Chap on the range, cover a wide variety of cool firearms,
highly nerdy usually, firearms technical stuff out of Switzerland. - Very. Yes.
- So ... an interesting different international perspective
on a lot of the firearms ... collecting space.
- Thank you very much for the plug. - Absolutely. Check them out, we'll have a link in the description below.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed this one. Thanks for watching.