hi guys thanks for tuning into another
video at Forgotten weapons comm I mean
and today I'm out here at the range
getting to play with a cool original
machine pistol a Mauser schmelff your or
model 712 a lot of people think that
well they made the broom-handle Mauser
in 1896 so I'm sure they made a
full-auto version of it at the same time
right the answer is actually not really
it wasn't until the early 1930s that
Mauser actually made a fully automatic
version of the venerable and ubiquitous
broom-handle Mauser pistol and in fact
what spurred this was the Civil War that
was kind of simmering in China through
the 1920s and 1930s
brew mantel mousers were very popular
pistols in China there was some
limitation on the ability of other
countries to import long guns and
military weapons into the country but
pistols weren't considered that so a lot
of broom-handle Mauser --zz were brought
in with shoulder stocks and were used as
de-facto carbines and very popular well
by the early 1930s there are some
Spanish companies like Astra and royal
that started to take advantage of this
market and one thing they decided they
could Trump the German spy is by
introducing a full-auto version so
Mauser recognized that hey some of these
Spanish companies are starting to take a
lot of our market with these full auto
copies of our pistol
we should probably offer one of those as
well so that's when they developed the
broom-handle
1930 was in development it was patented
in 1931 interestingly the first version
of this full auto modification was done
by none other than Joseph Nichols who is
known for a number of other pistol
developments in Germany at the time now
his version they only made about 4000 of
and it's recognizable because it has
kind of a typical lever type selector
lever selector switch
it was very quickly replaced by a
slightly different version made by man
named Carl Westerner and that's what we
have here this has a kind of
recognizable semicircular selector lever
on those they made about 98,000 of so
all in all a little over a hundred
thousand of these full auto mousers were
manufactured the vast majority of them
went to China but they were bought by
some other countries Brazil bought some
number of other places Turkey Persia or
Iran as we call it today I think got
around but by far biggest customer was
China now these fire at a fairly high
rate of fire nine hundred thousand
rounds per minute
they are the vast majority of them are
in seven point six three millimeter
Mauser and frankly I suspect in China a
lot of them were used with Tokarev ammo
which would up the rate of fire beyond
even that I'm using this one primarily
with the shoulder stock if you shoot
this just as a pistol it's frankly it's
virtually uncontrollable the bore axis
on a broom-handle Mauser is very high to
begin with and when you make that thing
full auto with a high rate of fire it's
pretty much worthless it's fun sort of
but it's worthless when you put a
shoulder stock on this it's actually
very controllable I will show you 20
round detachable magazines by the way
these they made 20s and they also made
ten round mags
so in semi-auto
all right so a couple little short
bursts as I said very high rate of fire
I forgot to mention something you do not
want to cross your thumb behind the gun
you stand a very good chance of getting
whacked on the knuckle if you're
shooting one of these you want to keep
your thumb on the same side of the gun
with a shoulder stock that doesn't
really injure grip all that much so we
have a slow-motion clip of me firing
this thing without the stock and as you
can see here it's it's kind of crazy and
it jumps all over the place and is not
worth doing
you
however there is an interesting anecdote
that the in China the some of the folks
who used these got this idea that if I'm
shooting this with one hand and it does
this well if I put it on its side that
recoil is gonna pull it side to side
right and that's going to make this nice
arc of fire that will be very effective
in cutting down everybody in the room
I'm not sure if that's true or if that's
just myth but I figure give it a try and
find out this is this is an awkward gun
to hold sideways it does definitely
spray side to side frankly it spray side
to side a lot more than I'd be actually
comfortable using that's a little bit
unnerving the way to use this thing is
definitely to keep it on the shoulder
stop
with that it's a nice effective little
machine carbine
you
entirely useless and impractical but man
is that fun that's wonderful
it's very controllable I love this thing
it's great with the shoulder stock yeah
if you were to shoot this with the
shoulder stock I think it'd be
completely viable but the second you go
ahead and remove and make it a pistol I
think it'd be terrible well thanks for
watching guys I hope you enjoyed the
video I want to shout out a thanks to
the crew at the firearm blog and tfbtv
for hooking me up with a chance to do
some shooting with this piece and if you
liked the video make sure to subscribe
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check back regularly for more cool
machine pistols on forgotten weapons
calm
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