Not Your Average Gun Blog

Welcome back to NYAGB! If you are new here, welcome, before you read this I highly recommend you read the first post, but if you don’t I don’t mind, I’m not here to control the reader, just give information to the reader! Either way, today we will be talking a little bit about the history of firearms, who made them, what the first “gun” even was, and how early guns influence the modern day gun industry!

From Gonne To Gun: The Origin of the “Handcannon”

We have all heard someone refer to a gun, generally the IMI Desert Eagle, as a “Handcannon”, and you might wonder what a handcannon even really is, so let me explain a little bit of history, before we had guns and artillery we had cannons and swords and whatnot, and at some point, people realized that it would make sense to have smaller, more portable cannons, and so, the general design of a cannon was shrunk down to fit under the shoulder, and held in the hands, and thus the name “handcannon” arose, of course these were also later referred to as hand-gonnes, the predecessor to the handgun, and just guns in general, so thank whoever said “I bet we can slayeth thy foe with small artillery” (that’s a joke I am sure no one actually said that, but thank whoever actually thought of the handcannon), now also you might be thinking “I wonder what the oldest handcannon is…” so I will refer you to the Heilongjiang hand cannon, made around the year 1288 CE, Wikipedia has a page on it, and I recommend you read it, it’s really interesting, here’s the link, have fun learning about it, and on to Topic 2!

From Gonne To Gun: Companies: Beretta!

I’m sure most people who know a little about guns have heard of Beretta, whether it be about th M9 (M92fs), their shotguns, or their match pistols, Beretta wasn’t always like that, they started off in 1526! At the time of writing this, 500 years ago! Back then they made Arqebus barrels, and they were founded by Bartolomeo Beretta, and the company is still owned under the Beretta family name, they produced arquebus barrels for a long time, but eventually switched to making actual firearms, I’m not sure exactly when they made the switch, but they did eventually, the oldest gun I know of from Beretta was the Model 1915, after that, they continued making firearms, one of those being the M92fs, this pistol was submitted as a weapon to replace the ever-famous M1911A1. It ended up replacing the M1911A1 and was named the M9 in service, it stayed in service a good long while, and received a few upgrades (M9A1 M9A2 M9A3 M9A4) until being replaced by SIG-Sauer, the gun was the P320 and was designated the M17/M18, in my opinion, this was a bad decision, and I will explain why it was a bad decision later, in a future post. Either way, thank YOU for reading today’s post, and I’ll write again next week! (hopefully)

P.S.

Hey! Sorry for the unexpected break (if you can even call it that) I intend to get back to the plan of WEEKLY (or maybe 2 posts per month), so please stay tuned!