Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm up here at Marstar in Canada
taking a look at some of their cool guns, among them this Vickers-Berthier.
So we already looked at the history and the mechanics of the Vickers-Berthier,
and now we're gonna be out on the range doing a little bit of shooting with it.
I've got a 30 round magazine, this looks like a Bren gun magazine,
but it is actually not. It's a unique and proprietary magazine design,
and well, let's see how it shoots.
Alright, because it is a top mounted magazine, nice and easy to load it up there. We'll drop the carry handle
out of the way, and then simply charge it back, run the charging handle forward, and we're ready to shoot.
That is a really smooth little light machine gun. This is a pretty early design and
fragile and expensive perhaps, but really nice to shoot. It's got a pretty low rate of fire.
I'll tell you what, it was super easy to keep the sights on target while you are just
continuously firing a burst. That's something that's not necessarily common or typical
on rifle calibre light machine guns, but boy, this thing does it really well. I'm actually quite impressed.
This is the first time I've ever shot one of these. Man, they're pretty cool.
I can actually see a lot of elements of guns like the French Châtellerault in this. I know the French...
this is one of the guns that the French were looking at when they developed the Châtellerault,
and I can see especially some of the mag release and the ... mag cover elements built into the Châtellerault.
I like it. Let's load up another mag and do a little bit more.
I like this thing.
I'll tell you what, this thing just does not move when you fire it.
It is rock solid despite firing full power .303 British rifle ammo.
I'm actually really impressed and surprised by that. Now one other thing people are going to ask about is,
especially as a lefty, how am I shooting this thing with a magazine right in the way?
Well, the answer is that the sights are offset to the left side of the gun
so they clear the side of the magazine. You can see that the front sight there is offset on the side.
And as a left-hander, all I have to do is just roll my head slightly over the stock and I can get a perfectly decent
sight picture. That works better on some guns than others and this one, it's not bad.
Thank you guys for watching, I hope you enjoyed the video.
Very cool to be able to actually do some shooting through a Vickers-Berthier.
These are really quite unusual, quite rare, light machine guns these days.
So a big thanks to Marstar for letting me check out their cool Vickers-Berthier.
If you are in the shooting community up in Canada, definitely check them out for
all of your supplies and shooting equipment needs.
And if you're not up in Canada, well, stay tuned to Forgotten Weapons for more cool light machine guns.
And I forgot to put it into fire.