Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten Weapons.
Yesterday we talked about the history and the mechanics of the vz.61 Skorpion.
And today we're out here on the range and we're gonna do a little bit of shooting with it.
Now ... the real question on the range is how are you supposed to use this thing?
Because it's not really a pistol. It's not really a submachine gun.
It's ... not quite unique, but it's in between a lot of different categories.
Well, we're gonna try out a couple things today.
So I've got the gun on, in its holster, and in this setup this is in fact
a substantially more convenient gun to carry than a submachine gun.
It's huge for a pistol, but if you're something like a tank crew, or an artillery crewman,
or someone who doesn't need a full size gun, but needs something better than a pistol,
this really isn't that bad to carry around. Got a couple of mag pouches, also not bad at all.
Definitely more convenient than a slung submachine gun or carbine.
At the same time, it does have more firepower than a pistol. So,
well let's break it out and just see how it works.
Put it into full-auto, charge it,
and you start with this little, dinky ten round magazine because it fits in the holster.
Once that thing's expended (I'll just drop it in there),
then we go to our 20 round magazines.
20 rounds, really not that large of a capacity for a gun like this.
I think the purpose of this is, if you start to get much longer of a magazine,
now you're kind of creeping into submachine gun territory.
And if you're gonna have a big magazine, well, why not have a little bit bigger gun,
and well, now you've got a submachine gun. If you want to keep it compact,
you're kind of limited on the size of the magazines you're gonna be able to use.
Anyway, once we've got a 20 rounder in here, we can drop the bolt.
And in short controlled bursts, this actually works pretty well.
You'll notice it's actually dropping brass on my head.
The brass goes straight up, like way up, and then comes straight back down.
Ah, jeez, see that's what I'm talking about with the brass coming down.
What I was going to say was, as long as you've got the stock deployed, even in a full, long burst,
it's pretty easy to keep this controllable. At least on, you know,
a couple foot square target, a human size target, at 20 or 25 yards.
Much more than that, it's going to be very difficult to shoot precisely.
But you could definitely keep someone's head down with this. If you need to
get out of your tank, and get to cover because your tank's been disabled,
this is a gun that will kind of take care of that for you.
So a couple thoughts about this. It does fire from a closed bolt, which is nice,
that helps for accuracy. These charging handle little nubs are kind of annoying to use.
You cannot do this really ... Well OK, you can do it one-handed, but ...
that's kind of weird.
I understand why they did it that way, because you'd rather have a kind of
obnoxious charging handle to use, than have some big things sticking out
of the gun that completely screws up your ability to carry it conveniently.
You also have a selector switch, so in semi-auto
you have a pistol.
You have a heavy and awkward pistol, and I would not recommend firing it from
just the pistol configuration in full-auto. If it's on semi have the stock folded, if it's on full-auto
(do that without muzzling myself, you'll notice), on full-auto the stock's out.
If the stock's out, always leave it on full-auto because that's the way this gun really is meant to run.
These are a lot of fun in full-auto, because there's basically no recoil.
The gun jumps around on you a little bit, but it's not really pushing back into your shoulder.
As long as you have even a little modicum of full-auto experience,
you're not going to have this thing climb uncontrollably on you with the stock.
With just the pistol grip, may be different. But as long as you've got the stock out, it's a lot of fun.
Of course fun isn't what it was designed for, but I can understand ... the utility of this.
It's a gun designed for a very specific task, and the features of the gun are
made to match that task, and it does it pretty well, so.
Alright, so I made an assumption that was incorrect here.
I assumed that this pistol, this machine pistol, would behave like most other machine pistols.
Namely if you tried to fire it this way, it would be completely uncontrollable, and you'd be doing this.
That's been my experience with all of the other machine pistols I've fired.
However, I figured you guys would want to see it. So I took this slow-motion video of me trying that.
As you can see, it doesn't climb hardly at all. And that took me really by surprise.
But, when we filmed that we were just about out of ammo for the day, so we are back here today.
And I want to do a little bit more of that shooting, and do it live real-time for you guys.
So the thing with the Skorpion is that because it's in .32 ACP, and it's got that nice rate reducer in there,
it's actually not that horrible of a gun to shoot like a pistol, much to my surprise.
Full-auto.
You can actually control that thing.
And I'm out.
So I stand corrected, while this is not as accurate and effective as a standard
service pistol in semi-auto, when fired in this configuration,
it's definitely controllable and it's definitely usable. And if you put in some time to practice,
I think you could actually be really quite effective with it in this form, and that's pretty cool.
I always like it when I discover something new and unexpected about a gun, and
that definitely happened here today.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video, thank you very much for watching.
I would definitely like to thank Marstar, up in Canada, for allowing me access to their
Skorpion to do some shooting with. If you are into the shooting sports up in Canada,
definitely check out Marstar. They've got all sorts of firearms and accessories, and cool surplus stuff as well.
Thanks for watching
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