[ Stocked Pistols: Pros and Cons ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I thought today we would take just a minute to talk about stocked pistols.
We haven't seen much in the way of stocked pistols
here in the United States for about the last 80 years,
basically because of the National Firearms Act
designating them short-barrelled rifles and heavily restricting them.
The internet has democratised NFA possession over the last 20 years or so,
but they're still not that common to find.
And I think people have made this logical (or illogical) leap
that because ... stocked pistols as a class,
because they are rare, or because they are hard to get, they must be good and desirable.
They go at least back to the flintlock period.
We've got an example here from the Smithsonian of a flintlock pistol with a detachable shoulder stock.
The idea has always been to balance the accuracy and shootability of a rifle
with the concealability and portability of a handgun.
And so how do you do that? Well you take a rifle,
you make the barrel really short and you make the stock detachable.
And in theory this means that you can take the stock off and carry it very easily,
or you can put the stock on and shoot it very accurately.
On paper this seems like a good idea, and I think that's why ... this design concept
has been in continuous use for the entire history of handguns.
However, I am going to argue that it never really quite does what people expect.
It never lives up to the expectations.
So first, off let's just take a quick look through
the plethora of shoulder-stocked pistols that have been available.
So moving on from flintlocks, in the black-powder era
we have Colt revolvers available with shoulder stocks.
They made them for ... the Dragoons, they made them for their Colt 1860s.
... As we start to enter the cartridge era,
we have examples of the Volcanic pistol with a detachable shoulder stock.
... A finger lever operated, manually ... operated pistol with a detachable shoulder stock.
Smith & Wesson made a version of their Number 3 revolver for the Australian police
with a detachable shoulder stock, with exactly this concept in mind.
Something that the trooper can carry easily, but put the stock on
if they have to make a long-distance shot with it.
Moving on to some of the early self-loading pistols,
... obviously the C96 Mauser is a classic iconic gun with its shoulder stock,
and we'll talk about that a little more in a minute.
But in the same time period we had
1894 Mannlichers available with shoulder stocks.
The Colt 1905 was available with a shoulder stock.
The FN 1903 was available with a shoulder stock.
Lugers had shoulder stocks,
there were a couple of different ... versions that were done for the Luger.
And then let's see, as we move a little more modern,
we have guns like the Browning Hi Power available with shoulder stocks.
There were some sort of more civilian targeted ones.
Webley made a .22 single-shot pistol
with a detachable shoulder stock on it to improve your practical accuracy.
We have some oddball stuff like the Benke-Thiemann stocks that were made for Lugers and Frommers
where it's not so much a detachable full stock, but a folding stock.
A collapsing, telescoping, really funky interesting stock that is really cool,
but actually does all of the things worse than really
any other more typical detachable stock.
And then we hit the modern era where we have guns like the Brügger & Thomet
USW (Universal Service Weapon) with a folding stock, not detachable but the same idea.
We have some of the designs that have come from Flux Defense.
Like I said, they continue to be on the market to this day.
Now let's look at ... how these actually work, because I've shot a number of these.
In fact I've shot all three of these guns in timed competition,
and none of them are quite as good as you'd expect.
So there is definitely ... an accuracy benefit to having the stock.
You can make hits on small targets and on long-range targets
more easily with the stock than without - for it just being a pistol.
However, I think a lot of people overestimate how much of a benefit that can actually be.
Because one of the substantial problems with these, to my mind, is that
they are all built around pistol sights.
Well, maybe with the exception of this incredibly strange Finnish Lahti monstrosity.
But they are virtually all made with pistol sights, and pistol sights are made
... for your eyes to focus on them at arm's length.
And when you have a stock like this, it is coming right back up close against your eye.
And you have an open notch sight that is just
physiologically not that good when positioned very close to the face.
And so your ability to get a good crisp sight picture is very much deteriorated
by shoulder stocks, and we see that pretty much universally.
Now with red dots today there is a little bit of a difference,
because ... the red dot doesn't really have those same issues.
So maybe in a way things are going to be more practical
with today's batch of stocked pistols, although I kind of doubt it.
One of the other problems that comes up is that pistols and their ammunition
are typically not particularly accurate when you compare them to rifles.
If you look at the bullseye standards
for pistols versus rifles, you'll find that pistols shoot far larger groups.
And it's not just because they are being shot off hand without that third point of contact
and thus people expect them to be practically speaking less accurate.
It is that pistol ammunition is almost never loaded
for really good accuracy, because it just doesn't need to be.
And it would be a waste of most pistol ammo manufacturer's money to make ammo that consistent.
And so even if your gun is accurate to 200 yards, and can ... make a nice small group,
if your ammo is not up to that same standard, and as an example 9mm Parabellum,
the most common pistol cartridge out there is definitely not up to that standard.
That's something I discovered with that USW at Desert Brutality a year or so ago.
Like once I got past about 125 yards, the group size on that thing just exploded and was huge.
So the accuracy benefits aren't as great as you might expect.
There are also issues with the stocks.
One of the more common things that was done historically
was to make the stock double as a holster, and the Hi Power here is a perfect example.
So what you can do is take the gun off the stock,
open the stock up, and it's actually hollow inside and the pistol fits into it.
And that seems like a really cool, multi-purpose sort of solution.
The problem is this always has downsides.
So the biggest one is this makes that stock kind of fragile,
in a military context this is not necessarily a great idea.
Now interestingly the C96 Mauser, which is
I would say the most successful stocked pistol design,
did have a holster just like this in concept, and they were used despite the potential fragility.
But in general, you end up with stocks that are fragile.
There are some leather examples that were made, like wire-framed leather holsters,
with the wire frame doubling as a shoulder stock extension.
Those have never really been militarily feasible.
So there have been, from time to time, military contracts for some of these pistols.
But there have really only been two, maybe three,
well, there have only been two pistols that actually saw significant military use with shoulder stocks.
And one of them of course is the Artillery Luger ... that we have here.
That was a key excellent weapon for the German storm troops (sturmtruppen)
... in ... about the last year of World War One.
They made good use of it, and it's largely because there was nothing better
available for the rather specific close-combat conditions that they were fighting in.
The other is the C96 Mauser, in particular in China.
So ... it's interesting, people recognise how common and popular the C96 Mauser was,
but it's important to recognise that there were very few actual military contracts for the C96.
It just wasn't that popular as a military sidearm.
It was purchased by the German army in World War One
when they needed anything they could get. Those are the iconic Red 9s,
and those did ship with shoulder stocks.
... There were a few small purchases, like the Italian Navy bought a couple of thousand C96s.
But ... beyond the Germans, none of them saw European combat use on any large scale.
The third was China, the Chinese Warlord Era was replete with C96s and copies thereof.
And they essentially ... used them in a role very similar
to the German Stormtrooper use of the Artillery Luger.
Now they didn't have drums on them, there were some with 20 round mags,
the vast majority had 10 round magazines fed by stripper clips.
But the Chinese warlords, many of them had a specific
sort of unit of troops who used stocked C96 pistols.
But that's really the only other major military use of these things.
Most C96s that saw military use were private purchase, sort of officers' sidearms.
And the same goes for a lot of the other stocked pistols out there.
So to my mind the problem is
... the compromise that you get between ... portability and accuracy,
in a military context turns out to be the worst of both worlds.
You actually get a gun that's bulky and inconvenient to carry,
and also not as accurate as you need it to be.
And so almost anything where a stocked pistol is convenient
has tended to go instead to a carbine or a submachine gun,
[or perhaps just a straight handgun], depending on exactly what the soldier in question needs. ...
Submachine guns in particular,
took over the role of stocked pistols I think in most practical applications.
So I know people today like to think that
these must be really desirable things because they are unavailable.
And I ... think when you ... get a chance to actually use them in practice,
they just always come up not quite so great.
And that's why ... the idea that they are cool continues to live.
And so, with the exception of the US under the NFA,
these things continue to be offered, but they never sell very well.
And that's part of why they are all so rare and scarce as collectibles
is because they weren't really all that typical.
... For every 10 people who bought a Colt 1905,
at least 9 of them opted to not bother to get the stock for example.
And those stocks that were built,
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.