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.
Gun Jesus on the front page? Color me suprised!
An MR73 is on my very short list of bucket list firearms.
Actually, it might be the only one on that list.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRC1y1xhIkI
Huh, a sniper revolver. Who'da thunk it.
I love this channel. A great blend of history and engineering.