Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video at ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian, and today I'm out here at the range getting to play
with a cool original machine pistol, a Mauser Schnellfeuer. Or a Model 712. A lot of people think that,
"Well they made the Broomhandle Mauser in 1896, so I'm sure they made a full-auto
version of it at the same time, right?" The answer is actually not really.
It wasn't until the early 1930s that Mauser actually made a fully automatic version of
the venerable and ubiquitous Broomhandle Mauser pistol. And in fact what spurred this was the Civil War that was
kind of simmering in China through the 1920s and 1930s. Broomhandle Mausers were very popular pistols in China. There was some limitation on the ability of other countries
to import long guns and military weapons into the country, but pistols weren't considered that. So a lot of Broomhandle Mausers were brought in with shoulder
stocks and were used as de-facto carbines and were very popular. Well, by the early 1930s there were some
Spanish companies, like Astra and Royal, that started to take advantage of this market.
And one thing they decided they could trump the Germans by is by
introducing a full-auto version. So Mauser recognised that, "Hey, some of these Spanish
companies are starting to take a lot of our market with these full-auto copies of our pistol.
We should probably offer one of those as well." So that's when they developed the Broomhandle.
1930 it was in development, it was patented in 1931. Interestingly, the first version of this full-auto
modification was done by none other than Josef Nickl, who is known for a number of other pistol
developments in Germany at the time. Now his version they only made about 4,000 of. And it's recognisable
because it has kind of a typical lever type selector ... switch. It was very quickly replaced by a slightly different version made
by a man named Karl Westinger, and that's what we have here. This has a kind of a recognisable
semicircular selector lever on it. Those they made about 98,000 of, so all in all a little over
100,000 of these full-auto Mausers were manufactured. The vast majority of them went to China. But they were bought by some other countries, Brazil
bought some, number of other places: Turkey, Persia, or Iran as we call it today. They got around,
but by far the biggest customer was China. Now these fire at a fairly high rate
of fire, 900 - 1,000 rounds per minute. ... The vast majority of them are in 7.63mm Mauser. And frankly I suspect in China a lot of
them were used with Tokarev ammo, which would up the rate of fire beyond even that. I'm using this one primarily with the shoulder stock. If you
shoot this just as a pistol it's, frankly, virtually uncontrollable. The bore axis on a Broomhandle
Mauser is very high to begin with, and when you make that thing full-auto with
a high rate of fire, it's pretty much worthless. It's fun, sort of, but it's worthless. When you put a shoulder stock on this,
it's actually very controllable. I will show you. 20 round detachable magazines, by the way. ...
They made 20s and they also made 10 round mags. So in semi-auto. Alright, so a couple of little short bursts. As I said, very high rate of fire. I forgot to mention something. You do not
want to cross your thumb behind the gun. You stand a very good chance of
getting whacked on the knuckle. If you're shooting one of these, you want to
keep your thumb on the same side of the gun. With a shoulder stock that doesn't
really impinge your grip all that much. So, we have a slow-motion clip of me firing this
thing without the stock, and as you can see here it's kind of crazy and it jumps all
over the place and it's not worth doing. However, there is an interesting anecdote that ... in China ... some of the folks who used these got this idea
that if I'm shooting this with one hand and it does this, well, if I put it on its side that recoil is gonna pull it
side to side, right? And that's going to make this nice arc of fire that will be very effective in
cutting down everybody in the room. I'm not sure if that's true or if that's just
a myth, but I figure give it a try and find out. This is an awkward gun to hold sideways. Do it one handed. It does definitely spray side to side. Frankly it sprays side to side a lot more than I'd be
actually comfortable using, that's a little bit unnerving. The way to use this thing is definitely
to keep it on the shoulder stock. With that, it's a nice effective little machine carbine. Entirely useless and impractical, but man, is that fun. That's wonderful, it's very controllable. - ... I love this thing.
- It's great with a shoulder stock. - Yeah, if you were to shoot this with the shoulder
stock, I think it'd be completely viable. But the second you go ahead and remove it
and make it a pistol, I think it'd be terrible. Well, thanks for watching guys,
and I hope you enjoyed the video. I really want to shout out a thanks to the
crew at The Firearm Blog and TFBTV for hooking me up with a chance to
do some shooting with this piece. And if you liked the video, make sure to
subscribe to the channel, tell your friends, and check back regularly for more cool
machine pistols on ForgottenWeapons.com. Alright, we call this the Oberndorf reload,
or Broom-ception. [ sub by sk cn2 ]
You tend to twist your elbow to absorb the recoil.
Wrong gun, Eva's gun was a knock off from the original Mauser.
The Mauser is a german, magazine fed pistol - well in this video it is. Eva's gun is the Chinese Type 17 (a variant of a Mauser but Chinese), clip fed weapon. You add bullets with a clip from the top.
I would be intrested if he actually shot the Mauser semi-automaticly and see if he could replicate it.
Was Eva on full auto? Cool video btw
Her's wasn't fully automatic, though. I wish we would've been able to use a mauser in a metal gear game, it's become one of my fav guns
Love that Mauser action. Like a miniature artillery piece.
He may be uncomfortable but a soldier with a lot of experience might not have a problem with the technique.