Machine Gun News, Volume 8, Number 9, February 1995; The Magazine for Full-Auto Enthusiasts

The format is approximately 8.5 inches by 11 inches. 60 pages, including covers. Illustrated covers. Illustrations. Tabular Data. Machine Gun News was published monthly to serve as a forum for Class III dealers and machine gun enthusiasts. Among the topics in this issue are CZ247 Submachine Gun, Fabricate Tokarev, Cartridge, Johnson Model 1941, Light Machine Gun, MP5, M11. The CZ247 was developed for Czechoslovakia’s post-war submachine gun trials, where it was pitted against the ZB47. It was a simple blowback 9x19mm SMG with a number of interesting elements, most notably the ability to fire with the magazine either vertical or horizontal. This made the gun more compact for use in a jungle sort of environment or to allow a shooter to get much lower to the ground when shooting prone. The CZ247 also has a neat safety mechanism for preventing unintended firing and a stripper clip guide built into the stock (both of which would be incorporated in the vz.48 SMG that was adopted). When the CZ247 failed to win the military trials, CZ got government permission to sell it on the export market. Czechoslovakia opted to support Israel in its declaration of independence in 1948, and the government decided to not send weapons to Egypt which might be used against Israel. This left the guns sitting in CZ warehouses, and the basically all stayed there for a few decades. Eventually most were sold to Nigeria in 1967 and Ethiopian in 1977 – and as a result they show up occasionally in African and Middle Eastern conflict zones to this day. The M1941 Johnson Rifle is an American short-recoil operated semi-automatic rifle designed by Melvin Johnson prior to World War II. The M1941 unsuccessfully competed with the contemporary M1 Garand rifle but was used in limited numbers by the US Marines during the Second World War. A widely held belief among US soldiers (when surveyed in 1952, 27% of soldiers held this opinion) was that the M1 Garand's distinctive clip ejection sound, the well-known "M1 ping", presented a danger when fighting an enemy force, as the sound could signal that the soldier's M1 rifle was empty. Regardless of any anecdotal beliefs, and despite the popularity of the story, there are no verified cases of an enemy using the "M1 ping" sound to their advantage up through the Korean War. Despite the several advantages the Johnson Rifle design had over the M1 Garand rifle, the existing disadvantages were too great to change US rifle production from the M1 Garand. The Johnson's short recoil reciprocating barrel mechanism resulted in excessive vertical shot dispersion that was never fully cured during its production life.…