What's that quote? I think it was the Pope, "How many divisions does he have?"
Well, not even a single one, but he does have some pretty sweet submachine guns.
Thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
taking a look at a SIG MKPS.
Now I should be clear here, this isn't
a gun that is specifically associated with the Vatican
or the Pope, not this particular one.
But this is a pattern of submachine gun that was purchased by the Vatican
and was used by the Papal Swiss Guard for a number of years.
And they are really nice submachine guns.
So SIG's manufacture of submachine guns starts in the 1920s
when they licensed production of the Bergmann.
In the wake of World War One, Bergmann submachine guns
couldn't be manufactured in Germany by German companies.
And so the patent owners of many different things
licensed out their guns, often to countries like Switzerland.
So SIG made Bergmann copies for a little while.
In 1927 they got into the process of designing their own submachine guns.
And really the first one that they came out with
was the SIG Model of 1930, which didn't last very long.
And by 1933 they were working on a gun that would become this.
So it was developed by a ... SIG engineer by the name of Gotthard End.
And what he originally came up with was a lever delayed,
blowback-operation submachine gun in 9mm Mauser (which is 9x25).
Really a pretty darn potent submachine gun cartridge.
Kind of the equivalent of a 10mm or a .45 Win Mag at that time.
And it had a brief period of not total unpopularity (!) before it fell out of favour.
At any rate, the gun was called the MKPO or MKMO.
So let's define the terminology here because this can be kind of confusing.
For all of these SIG submachine guns the "MK" is standard,
and that is "Maschinen Karabiner", machine carbine or submachine gun.
And in this case not quite a full auto pistol calibre,
because ... that 9x25 is more powerful, so they called it a machine carbine.
Then the third letter will be either an "M" for military, which means a long barrel,
or a "P" for police, which means a short barrel.
In addition, the military ones used a 40 round mag and the police ones used a 30 round mag.
Although the magazines themselves are interchangeable, just
you'll see in a moment, the magazine folds up into the stock.
And a police gun can't fit a 40 round magazine in the stock because it's too long.
Anyway, there is then a fourth letter which is either an "O" or an "S",
and that denotes the mechanism of the gun.
So originally it was the "O" as standard, and honestly I don't know what that stood for.
But the gun was a lever-delayed blowback based on the Király system from Pál Király of Hungary.
This would go on to be used in guns like the San Cristóbal carbine as well.
But SIG licensed that patent and used it in their submachine guns.
And it was a really good mechanism for a really hot pseudo-pistol cartridge like 9mm Mauser.
In 1937 however, facing a basically complete lack of international interest,
the sales of the MK-O series were very poor, they made a few changes.
They dramatically simplified the gun by getting rid of the lever-delayed system
and making it simple blowback only.
And that's where we get the "S" designation, like this one.
This is an "MKP" (because it's the short barrel, 11.5 inches) "S".
The "S" guns are simple blowback.
They are also sort of a 45 degree side eject,
where the first pattern of lever-delayed guns were vertical top eject.
... When they got rid of the 9x25mm chambering they replaced it with three different options.
You could get these in 7.63 Mauser.
You could get them in 7.65 Parabellum, the original Luger cartridge.
Or you could get them in 9mm Parabellum, and most of them were made
in 9mm Parabellum, including this one
So, let me show you how it works.
I want to first take a moment to appreciate just how beautiful these things are.
I honestly think this is one of the best looking submachine guns ever produced.
At the back here we've got a stock design, a sling bar, a semi-pistol grip,
that are taken straight off the Swiss K31 rifles.
The manufacturer's mark here on the back of the receiver tube.
The "J" is sort of the Germanic spelling of an "I".
So the Swiss Industrial Society of Neuhausen, that would become SIG later on.
We've got a rear sight here that is also very distinctively reminiscent of the K31.
There is a safety selector on the side, fire and safe.
Just slides back and forth. There is no semi-auto selector, it's full-auto all the time only.
Slightly less appealing, we have the remnants of a very old, very lightly struck import mark here
that frankly I can't really read, except that it's somewhere in Illinois.
Flipping it over here, we've got our sort of 45 degree ejection port out the side.
We've got our bolt handle, these are open bolt guns.
So the bolt will lock open, and drop when you pull the trigger.
Yet another K31 element, a nice square, rifle style, drift adjustable, front post there.
Sling swivel on the left.
We've got these really cool angled finger grooves.
And then ... the most distinctive mechanical feature of the gun,
which is the folding magazine well.
We've got a cover plate here, the magazine well here, and the magazine itself there.
So to open this, you actually have to lift this spring-loaded cover.
And then you can pull the magazine down,
and it will lock in place there at the 90 degree position.
You can see that the stock is recessed for the magazine to sit in.
There's a little metal block right here
that's screwed into the stock on both sides: there, and there.
And that is basically the stop, the rest, for the magazine.
So to refold the magazine, by the way, you again have to lift this ... spring-loaded catch
then you can fold it back down into place.
The way that works, by the way, we've got a little inside reinforcing plate here.
These two flat surfaces lock against the back of the magazine well itself there.
That's what locks it in the folded position, it can't lift.
Then in the upward position we have a little hook, right here,
that locks into the back of the magazine well like that.
And that's what's going to lock it in that position.
Also, we have our magazine release here on the front.
And you'll notice on the magazine there's a little catch right there,
so that's what holds the magazine in place.
These are very well made magazines, they are double stack, double feed.
You've got a series of witness holes there, as I said, the military ones were 40 round.
It would have had an additional witness mark below.
And the magazines are serialised to the individual guns.
This particular one does not match ... this particular gun.
Now you may be thinking, "OK, how interesting can a simple blowback submachine gun be inside?"
Well, let's open it up and take a look.
It's Swiss, so naturally the screws are held in place by retaining screws,
and they are actually serialised. These are, of course, matching screws.
Alright, with those out of the way we can lift the trigger guard off, not much going on there.
Then the handguard is also retained by a screw.
So we need to take this out.
There we go, that comes off. Naturally the upper handguard is serialised (and matches).
Now I can lift the action gently out of the stock.
And then at the front here that nose cap is actually attached,
so we lift that off the stock.
There's our stock, there's the rest for the magazine.
Not really anything else going on there.
Nose cap and front sight are attached to the end of the barrel.
We have our pivoting magazine well. Note that the ejector
is screwed into the back of the magazine well.
Here we have our trigger mechanism. A couple of interesting features.
First off, if the safety is in the fire position you cannot unscrew the end cap.
You have to put the safety into safe, which retracts this bar out of that slot.
Now I can push down the locking button and unscrew the receiver.
Now here's another interesting little feature here.
You may have wondered what would happen if you had a
simple tube-like submachine gun like this,
and you fired it without the end cap on, or with the end cap only partially screwed on.
And so maybe the bolt is going to hit the back hard enough to blow the end cap off.
That sounds like it could be pretty bad, well SIG also noticed that.
And so there's actually an additional mechanical safety in here.
This lever (for lack of a better term) prevents you from firing.
Let's see, let's go ahead and put this in the fire position.
Alright, so I've got it in the fire position, with this in that little notch.
But my end cap is not all the way screwed on, and so this lug is not held all the way down.
Well, I can't fire the gun.
I can't pull the trigger unless this lug is retracted.
That fires ... that doesn't.
So they actually built in another mechanical safety
to prevent you from firing it if the gun wasn't completely fully assembled.
You can see a bit of legacy from the Bergmann here with the small diameter recoil spring.
But you've got a recoil spring and a guide rod.
Pull the bolt back to here, the bolt handle comes out.
And then we can pull out the bolt.
And the firing pin is in there, ... and that comes out.
Now what's interesting about this is it has a separate firing pin,
but it is essentially a fixed firing pin design.
This doesn't move, it's always protruding out the front of the bolt face.
And the ... way that that's done is (you can see the recess for it right there)
when I drop the firing pin in,
the bolt handle locks it in place and you can see the firing pin tip is protruding out there.
So if something happens to the firing pin it can be replaced.
This means it can be hardened separately from the rest of the bolt body.
And it can be manufactured as a separate piece.
So there's the firing pin.
The bolt here, you've got a recess in the back for the spring.
You've got your extractor.
Serial number, matches, naturally.
In fact the only part on this thing that doesn't match, aside from the magazine,
is the bolt handle, which is numbered
right there, 455.
So ... that and the magazine are the only mismatched bits.
Anyway, the rest of this is in fact basically a simple blowback submachine gun.
But man, take a look to appreciate it, that manufacturing.
This isn't a piece of tubing, this was a piece of solid bar stock
that has been drilled and reamed out to exactly the proper diameter.
You've got your threads back here are a slightly larger diameter.
This is an absolutely beautifully made piece of industrial work.
And there you go, there is the whole thing disassembled.
Frankly, I think these are absolutely beautiful submachine guns.
The manufacturing standards are impeccable, I think they look fantastic,
the folding magazine's cool, the interesting little finger grooves are cool.
... Basically the callbacks to the Swiss K31 rifle series are really cool.
You've got the pistol grip, you've got the sling attachments, the sights.
The Swiss make fantastic firearms, frankly the Swiss make a lot of fantastic things.
But these are really quite scarce in the US, in fact they're really quite scarce everywhere.
Because the grand total production of all of these guns put together,
all of the MK series, the Os, the Ps, the Ss, the Ms, was 1,228 guns - that was it.
There were no huge military contracts, the Swiss military did not adopt these.
In fact the Swiss military really had no interest in submachine guns at all
until about 1940 when they saw them being used in World War Two and kind of went "Oh."
Kind of like the British, they went from, "Oh, it's a gangster gun that no one actually needs"
to, "Oh, we'd actually like to have quite a lot of those please."
And so ... versions of this would compete for Swiss military adoption during World War Two.
They would ultimately lose out to the Waffenfabrik Bern MP41s designed by Adolf Furrer.
I have a video on those if you're interested in them.
But the two ... most notable purchasers of these were the Vatican,
who actually didn't buy all that many, although I don't know the exact number, and actually Finland.
Finland was I believe the single largest purchaser, and they bought 282 of them
in the late spring and early summer of 1940, so essentially after the Winter War had ended.
The Finns are looking for more submachine guns while they're trying to manufacture more Suomis,
these are available, and so they are purchased.
And so they did actually see some use in the Continuation War,
although mostly with units who weren't in front-line combat
because it's a non-standard gun for the Finnish military.
Anyway, this particular one is of course an NFA registered,
curio and relic eligible, fully transferable piece, which is fantastically cool.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.