Hi guys, thanks for tuning in another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and thanks to the French Ministry of the Interior
we have access today to the coolest combat revolver ever made.
This is a Manurhin MR73, and this specifically
is the GIGN sniper version of the MR73.
Now I want to start by discussing the fact that
GIGN used a revolver, which is pretty unusual in
the special operations community.
And the first question a lot of people ask is why on earth would an organisation like this pick a revolver?
Well, this revolver, the requirements for it came in the very early 1970s, and ... so you have to consider it in the context of the time.
The autoloading pistols that were most readily available to GIGN at that point were guns like the 1911,
the Browning Hi Power, the MAC 50, (the French Army standard pistol at that time).
All of those guns are single action only, which means they cannot be used immediately upon being drawn.
They weren't being carried chambered, cocked and locked. These guns were being carried either hammer down
or with an empty chamber, and so they required some sort of manipulation before they could be ready to fire.
A double action revolver (and by the way, yes, we can argue that they wouldn't necessarily have to be but
that's how they were used at the time), so a double action revolver has no manual safety.
It doesn't require cocking. It doesn't require loading. Nothing. Draw, pull trigger, fire.
So that was one major advantage that it offered.
Secondly, autoloading pistols at that time were not known to be particularly reliable with
anything other than standard FMJ ball ammunition.
And especially groups like GIGN had to be concerned about over-penetration.
For example, airline hijackings, ... if you have to shoot someone in an airliner,
it's almost impossible to have a shot that doesn't have a bystander behind your target, because it's an airliner.
And so they were concerned about FMJ going through a terrorist and then hitting, say, an airline passenger.
But with revolver ... perfectly acceptable to use, say, jacketed hollow points, bullets that are going to expand and not over-penetrate.
That wasn't possible so much in the autoloaders of the time.
And lastly, and the one criteria that most people recognise and often comment on is reliability.
Autoloading pistols are pretty darn reliable in the '70s, but not as reliable as a revolver.
Every once in a while you're going to get a failure to feed, you're going to get a failure to extract or eject.
You don't get that with a 6 shot revolver.
So, on top of those considerations which really make ... a revolver make quite a lot of sense,
on top of that GIGN as an organisation had a philosophy that was more focused on a few very precise, very good shots
rather than overwhelming volume of firepower. So to their mind a 6 shot capacity really wasn't a problem.
Especially considering most of the other guns at the time had an 8 or 9 round detachable magazine,
6 wasn't that much fewer, and they weren't seeing any real need to have more than 6.
You know, if they can't get the job done in 2 or 3, they're not doing it right, and they trained to do it right the first time.
I should probably mention GIGN is the special operations unit of the French Gendarmerie.
They're the equivalent of like the FBI Hostage Rescue Team.
So they're the ones who are doing a lot of counter- terrorism. You could equate them to GSG9 in Germany.
Not really SEAL teams because they're not really military, they're more police. But that was their operational spectrum.
So as a result of all of these design criteria the Manurhin company comes up with a revolver design.
They submitted it, gets adopted in 1973, ... it becomes GIGN's standard issue sidearm, and gets quite a lot of very effective use.
Now, these are typically issued in like 3, 4 and 5.25 inch barrel versions, but they also had
an 8 inch barrel version, and that's what we have here.
This is a version that was, as you can see, equipped out with a low-power pistol scope and a bipod.
And this is legitimately the sniper version of the revolver.
Now in order to properly understand the context of this you need to recognise that GIGN
had a tremendous amount of flexibility in its weaponry.
So GIGN operators had a ton of guns at their disposal, basically anything that they wanted.
And for any given mission they could pick out what they thought was the most appropriate weapon to take.
So some people will see a scoped revolver like this and say like,
"Oh, what, did they have a problem with rifles? Like, rifles work, rifles work better than this."
Well, the answer is yes they do, most of the time, but not all of the time. There are situations where a rifle is
too large, too bulky, too long, too heavy to be the ideal weapon for a particular mission.
Case in point, in 1981 GIGN took over the mission of presidential security for the President of France.
Previously had been the domain of the police agencies, went over to the Gendarmerie.
In the presidential mansion there are a number of big round windows that have very little space behind them.
And if you wanted to position a sniper up there on overwatch the problem is
the rifle barrel is going to have to stick out the window, and that's a bad thing. ... You know, you want these guys to be covert.
Well, if you have someone up there with a bipod-mounted scoped revolver they can be completely discreet, invisible,
and yet still have more than enough potential accuracy to make the longest shot required inside a building.
... Even one of these grand European palaces, you're not talking more than like 100 yards
potential anywhere for a shot from one of those positions.
These are exceptionally accurate revolvers, put a scope on it, put a bipod on it and it is perfectly capable of fulfilling that mission really well.
So that's the sort of thing that these guns were intended for.
The markings on here are pretty basic and standard. We have MR73, calibre .357 Magnum.
And a Manurhin name and logo on the right side, with a beautiful, glossy, high polished, blue finish.
They have a swing out cylinder. That's all pretty basic, simple stuff right there.
So mechanically speaking the MR73 is kind of an improved version of Smith & Wesson lockwork.
This is a .357 Magnum calibre revolver. The guys at GIGN had quite an independent streak
and as one might expect a bit of a macho streak, and they initially actually looked into using
kind of custom loaded ammunition that was like +P++++.
But that had a deleterious effect on the longevity of the guns, and it was quite difficult to shoot,
like a little too difficult to shoot well and accurately, so they stepped it back to standard, just .357 Magnum.
However, the guns were required to be able to withstand the GIGN ... general training routine,
these guys shoot a lot of ammunition.
The number that I found (which I'm not 100% sure on, but it's certainly in the right ballpark), was
this gun had to be designed to withstand 150 rounds of full power .357 Magnum per day
for the entire life of the pistol. Because that's the sort of round count that GIGN operators were actually
shooting for practice on a regular daily basis.
So, something like a Smith & Wesson, the gun was very nice, but it lost cylinder gap, it lost timing.
It just wasn't up to that sort of multiple 100,000 round lifespan. And that's what the MR73 was designed to meet.
So there is a tremendous amount of hand-fitting that was involved in these guns.
They were very expensive revolvers, they still are today.
But the quality is there to match the price and to match that sort of longevity.
The trigger mechanism is built with a couple of roller bearings in it to give a very smooth trigger pull.
It actually has a trigger that is adjustable in both single and double action.
It has a bit of a heavier cocking stroke than is typical,
but ... on the other side of the equation it has a bit of a lighter and smoother double action trigger pull than is typical.
(Man, that's nice.)
It really was designed to be able to be fired with a high level of precision in double action.
Going back to that being able to draw and fire immediately from the holster.
So now the sniper model here specifically has a Bushnell scope on it, which is not a brand we think of today
as being like super effective. Like if someone was going to make the ultimate military
presidential protection sniper pistol, a Bushnell Magnum Phantom is probably not the scope you would think of.
But this is the 1970s and this is what was available. So it's a 2.5x power scope,
obviously has elevation and windage adjustments on it. The ... reticle is just a simple crosshair.
The bipod mount is a block here, it is tightened in place by this.
It has four round rods that are used to centre it around the barrel. On this particular one, one of those is missing.
And you'll see that the ... mounting block is marked Manurhin.
Apparently what actually happened was the Gendarmerie arsenal that was supporting the GIGN at the time,
the armourers there designed this, they came up with exactly how they wanted it to work, how they wanted it designed.
They then gave those blueprints to Manurhin, and Manurhin manufactured them and sold them back to GIGN.
The bipod is a standard Harris bipod from the time. Quite good, nothing particularly exotic.
And of course it folds back into the gun.
Has spring-loaded legs.
And you can extend the legs quite a lot should your position require it.
Obviously this is the sort of thing that can be used in a lot of fairly awkward positions.
The accuracy standard for an MR73 out of the factory was no more than a 20mm group at 25 metres.
That's equivalent to about eight tenths of an inch, these are supremely accurate revolvers.
The hand fitting and the quality that went into them, really it shows through.
These are every bit as good of a gun as a Colt Python, arguably better given the the longevity that they can stand up to.
So the last question that comes up is are they still using these? Because GIGN likes to show these off.
They're quite proud of this, they kind of like the idea that they are high speed operators using .357 Magnum revolvers.
Well the truth of the matter is this, the MR73 (not the sniper version here, but the standard revolver),
is still the official GIGN sidearm for ceremonial purposes and they still have them in their armouries.
However, they haven't really been an operational weapon since probably about 2000.
But there's no way you can make a definitive statement on that, because as I described earlier,
they have a tremendous amount of individual latitude and discretion on weaponry for any particular mission.
So it is entirely possible that some of the old time operatives kept carrying revolvers
well past when they had really good semi-auto alternative options,
simply because they liked revolvers and they were used to them.
There is no official date of a GIGN weapon like this being officially retired, ... well there are official adoption times, but
never officially retired. So at this time there are still a handful of these sniper versions in the arsenal,
but I think it's probably been 15 years since one of them was actually used operationally.
So I should touch a little bit on the history of the Manurhin company in general because they did a bunch of different guns.
So the company was actually formed right after World War One in 1919, and they started out making
... they were an equipment manufacturer. This is Manufacture de Machines du Haut-Rhin.
...
And initially they started out making machinery and equipment for food preparation and for jewelry.
Kind of an interesting dichotomy there. And then they started expanding.
In 1922 they expanded at first into making machinery for ammunition manufacture,
and then they would diversify and expand further and build their own ammunition plants in ... 1928 and 1936.
Those would eventually be nationalised by the government, they were used to produce ammo during World War Two.
And then the Manurhin that we're familiar with today really began in the late 1940s, after World War Two.
And that's when they went into actual firearms manufacture,
and they started making licenced copies of a couple of foreign brands of firearms.
Specifically they made SIG rifles and they also made Walther pistols.
So the most common one you'll find is the Manurhin P1 pistols, ... it's a P38 made under licence.
They would also make copies of the Walther PP and PPK.
And those those were produced through the 1950s, basically until Walther was able to restart its own manufacturing in Germany
after Germany was kind of freed of some of ... the post-World War Two restrictions.
That relationship between Manurhin and Walther over their licence production once Walter was able to start its own business,
that didn't end on a very friendly note. But that's a subject for an entirely different video.
Ultimately by 1983 ... Manurhin split in two and the defence sector with ... what was firearms
but then also ammunition, cannons and a lot of other larger scale stuff was split off.
That was sold to GIAT Group, which included Saint-Étienne at that point, in 1990 and then GIAT shut down about ten years later.
So that's kind of a general overview of who Manurhin was.
And the MR73 is I think without a doubt the finest revolver they ever made,
and arguably one of the best revolvers ever made, period.
So it's very cool to get a chance to take a look at one of these authentic GIGN sniper model MR73s.
There are very few of them still around today.
So a big thanks to the Ministry of the Interior for having that access.
Thank you for watching, I hope you enjoyed the video.