[ Stocked Pistols: Pros and Cons ] Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I thought today we would
take just a minute to talk about stocked pistols. We haven't seen much
in the way of stocked pistols here in the United States
for about the last 80 years, basically because of the
National Firearms Act designating them short-barrelled rifles
and heavily restricting them. The internet has democratised NFA
possession over the last 20 years or so, but they're still not that common to find. And I think people have made
this logical (or illogical) leap that because ... stocked pistols as a class, because they are rare, or because they are
hard to get, they must be good and desirable. They go at least back
to the flintlock period. We've got an example here from the Smithsonian of
a flintlock pistol with a detachable shoulder stock. The idea has always been to balance
the accuracy and shootability of a rifle with the concealability
and portability of a handgun. And so how do you do that?
Well you take a rifle, you make the barrel really short
and you make the stock detachable. And in theory this means that you can
take the stock off and carry it very easily, or you can put the stock on
and shoot it very accurately. On paper this seems like a good idea,
and I think that's why ... this design concept has been in continuous use for
the entire history of handguns. However, I am going to argue that it
never really quite does what people expect. It never lives up to the expectations. So first, off let's just take
a quick look through the plethora of shoulder-stocked
pistols that have been available. So moving on from flintlocks,
in the black-powder era we have Colt revolvers
available with shoulder stocks. They made them for ... the Dragoons,
they made them for their Colt 1860s. ... As we start to enter the cartridge era, we have examples of the Volcanic
pistol with a detachable shoulder stock. ... A finger lever operated, manually ... operated
pistol with a detachable shoulder stock. Smith & Wesson made a version of their
Number 3 revolver for the Australian police with a detachable shoulder stock,
with exactly this concept in mind. Something that the trooper can
carry easily, but put the stock on if they have to make a
long-distance shot with it. Moving on to some of the
early self-loading pistols, ... obviously the C96 Mauser is a classic
iconic gun with its shoulder stock, and we'll talk about that
a little more in a minute. But in the same time period we had 1894 Mannlichers available with shoulder stocks. The Colt 1905 was available
with a shoulder stock. The FN 1903 was available with a shoulder stock. Lugers had shoulder stocks, there were a couple of different ...
versions that were done for the Luger. And then let's see, as we
move a little more modern, we have guns like the Browning
Hi Power available with shoulder stocks. There were some sort of
more civilian targeted ones. Webley made a .22 single-shot pistol with a detachable shoulder stock on it
to improve your practical accuracy. We have some oddball stuff like the Benke-Thiemann
stocks that were made for Lugers and Frommers where it's not so much a detachable
full stock, but a folding stock. A collapsing, telescoping, really funky
interesting stock that is really cool, but actually does all of the things worse than really any other more typical detachable stock. And then we hit the modern era where
we have guns like the Brügger & Thomet USW (Universal Service Weapon) with a
folding stock, not detachable but the same idea. We have some of the designs
that have come from Flux Defense. Like I said, they continue
to be on the market to this day. Now let's look at ... how these actually
work, because I've shot a number of these. In fact I've shot all three of
these guns in timed competition, and none of them are quite
as good as you'd expect. So there is definitely ... an accuracy
benefit to having the stock. You can make hits on small targets
and on long-range targets more easily with the stock than
without - for it just being a pistol. However, I think a lot of people overestimate
how much of a benefit that can actually be. Because one of the substantial
problems with these, to my mind, is that they are all built around pistol sights. Well, maybe with the exception of this
incredibly strange Finnish Lahti monstrosity. But they are virtually all made with
pistol sights, and pistol sights are made ... for your eyes to focus
on them at arm's length. And when you have a stock like this, it is
coming right back up close against your eye. And you have an open
notch sight that is just physiologically not that good when
positioned very close to the face. And so your ability to get a good crisp
sight picture is very much deteriorated by shoulder stocks, and we
see that pretty much universally. Now with red dots today
there is a little bit of a difference, because ... the red dot doesn't
really have those same issues. So maybe in a way things
are going to be more practical with today's batch of stocked
pistols, although I kind of doubt it. One of the other problems that comes up
is that pistols and their ammunition are typically not particularly accurate
when you compare them to rifles. If you look at the
bullseye standards for pistols versus rifles, you'll find
that pistols shoot far larger groups. And it's not just because they are being shot
off hand without that third point of contact and thus people expect them to be
practically speaking less accurate. It is that pistol ammunition
is almost never loaded for really good accuracy,
because it just doesn't need to be. And it would be a waste of most pistol ammo
manufacturer's money to make ammo that consistent. And so even if your gun is accurate to 200
yards, and can ... make a nice small group, if your ammo is not up to that same standard,
and as an example 9mm Parabellum, the most common pistol cartridge out
there is definitely not up to that standard. That's something I discovered with that
USW at Desert Brutality a year or so ago. Like once I got past about 125 yards, the group
size on that thing just exploded and was huge. So the accuracy benefits aren't
as great as you might expect. There are also issues with the stocks. One of the more common
things that was done historically was to make the stock double as a holster,
and the Hi Power here is a perfect example. So what you can do is
take the gun off the stock, open the stock up, and it's actually
hollow inside and the pistol fits into it. And that seems like a really cool,
multi-purpose sort of solution. The problem is this
always has downsides. So the biggest one is this
makes that stock kind of fragile, in a military context this is
not necessarily a great idea. Now interestingly the
C96 Mauser, which is I would say the most successful
stocked pistol design, did have a holster just like this in concept,
and they were used despite the potential fragility. But in general, you end up
with stocks that are fragile. There are some leather examples that
were made, like wire-framed leather holsters, with the wire frame doubling
as a shoulder stock extension. Those have never really
been militarily feasible. So there have been, from time to time,
military contracts for some of these pistols. But there have really only
been two, maybe three, well, there have only been two pistols that actually
saw significant military use with shoulder stocks. And one of them of course is the
Artillery Luger ... that we have here. That was a key excellent weapon for
the German storm troops (sturmtruppen) ... in ... about the last year of World War One. They made good use of it, and it's
largely because there was nothing better available for the rather specific close-combat
conditions that they were fighting in. The other is the C96 Mauser,
in particular in China. So ... it's interesting, people recognise how
common and popular the C96 Mauser was, but it's important to recognise that there were
very few actual military contracts for the C96. It just wasn't that popular
as a military sidearm. It was purchased by the
German army in World War One when they needed anything they
could get. Those are the iconic Red 9s, and those did ship with shoulder stocks. ... There were a few small purchases, like the
Italian Navy bought a couple of thousand C96s. But ... beyond the Germans, none of them
saw European combat use on any large scale. The third was China, the Chinese Warlord Era
was replete with C96s and copies thereof. And they essentially ... used
them in a role very similar to the German Stormtrooper
use of the Artillery Luger. Now they didn't have drums on them,
there were some with 20 round mags, the vast majority had 10 round
magazines fed by stripper clips. But the Chinese warlords,
many of them had a specific sort of unit of troops
who used stocked C96 pistols. But that's really the only other
major military use of these things. Most C96s that saw military use were
private purchase, sort of officers' sidearms. And the same goes for a lot of
the other stocked pistols out there. So to my mind the problem is ... the compromise that you get
between ... portability and accuracy, in a military context turns out
to be the worst of both worlds. You actually get a gun that's
bulky and inconvenient to carry, and also not as accurate
as you need it to be. And so almost anything where
a stocked pistol is convenient has tended to go instead to
a carbine or a submachine gun, [or perhaps just a straight handgun], depending
on exactly what the soldier in question needs. ... Submachine guns in particular, took over the role of stocked pistols
I think in most practical applications. So I know people today like to think that these must be really desirable
things because they are unavailable. And I ... think when you ... get a
chance to actually use them in practice, they just always come up
not quite so great. And that's why ... the idea that
they are cool continues to live. And so, with the exception
of the US under the NFA, these things continue to be offered,
but they never sell very well. And that's part of why they are all
so rare and scarce as collectibles is because they weren't
really all that typical. ... For every 10 people
who bought a Colt 1905, at least 9 of them opted to not
bother to get the stock for example. And those stocks that were built, Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.
