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Old August 18, 2012, 06:29 PM   #18
BlueTrain
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Join Date: September 26, 2005
Location: Northern Virginia
Posts: 6,141
I don't know the origin of most of these full-auto pistols, which have been around almost as long as automatic pistols, but probably most of them were purely commercial ventures on the part of arms manufacturers. There are always new experimental weapons being developed that often as not never see the light of day. Others make it into catalogs or sales brochures, such as the later Madsen general purpose or light machine guns and are produced but basically failures from a sales standpoint, probably because they were introduced at a bad time or otherwise did not represent a significant advance of something everyone already had plenty of.

As an example of the latter, the FN-1949 (as it's generally known) was an excellent rifle produced to a high quality standard. It was adopted and used by some armies but at the time, the Garand rifle had already been widely distributed when European armies rearmed after the war and the FN wasn't significantly better. In fact, the Garand was going to be manufactured for nearly another ten years, which is surprising in itself.

The Mauser C96 and later variations had a following in Russia and the USSR and probably inspired the introduction of the Stechkin. It is a sort of throwback idea, sort of, but was issued for some purposes, but nothing like US M1 carbines were. But in that case, it was no doubt designed to a military specification. In the West, however, most would probably have chosen a UZI instead, if they could. FN made UZI submachine guns, too.

One writer in describing the use of shoulder stocked pistols during the Russo-Finnish wars of the 1940s said they were "almost as good as a submachine gun," and that's good enough for me.
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