In my life I’ve been blessed and lucky enough to handle and fire a bunch of different machine guns. I don’t remember one that wasn’t fun to fire, but these are the top 5 I’ve enjoyed.
Glock 19 Converted to Full Auto
This would be more in the machine pistol category, but was really fun. When I was in Iraq in 2009, one of the guys I worked with had a back plate to a Glock that made it full auto. So, of course, we had to try it. We checked out ammo and the range, put the back plate on an extra Glock 19 we had sitting around and fired it.
The gun cycles impossibly fast. Most of us couldn’t get it to do a burst of less than five rounds at a time. So a normal magazine was gone by pressing the trigger three times. It was controllable up close even burning through full magazines. You can’t fire one of these without putting a smile on your face. Hopefully (maybe), if it ever becomes legal, I can get one of these conversions. Here’s a video from their web page.
Mini Uzi
I really didn’t get to train with one of these weapons but it was a lot of fun. The weight was a good balance of heavy and light. The heavier the gun the nicer the recoil and the more controllable it is, but you have to carry it around and hold it up, so when you are carrying anything for a long period of time, the lighter the better. The size is really cool and with a folding stock, this sub-machine gun is just awesome.
It cycles incredibly fast. The numbers say about 1200 rounds per minute, but if felt way faster than anything I’ve fired. It was just inspiring to shoot.
It fires from the open bolt, which is totally different than what we are used to. In machine guns the open bolt helps with the heat of the gun. Guns get hot and machine guns can easily be double the heat of a semi-auto version. Airflow through the open bolt and end of the barrel help to keep it cooler. There is no real danger from a round cooking off because the gun doesn’t chamber a round until it is ready to fire. Very helpful but very odd if you have never fired one.
Firing from an open bolt does affect accuracy and make it harder to make precision shots. But that is not what a machine gun was designed to do. The Mini Uzi does have a selector switch that lets it fire semi auto, but I wasn’t interested in playing with that when I had magazines, ammo, and a range where I could shoot full auto.
AK-47
Firing an AK on full auto is just fun. It’s the most noted assault rifle in history. It’s a 30 caliber round with a controllable cycle rate. The gun just seems to chug along at about 800 rounds a minute. The recoil impulse is sweet and makes the gun hold on target.
At first glance, an AK is ugly and generally dressed funny. The furniture is either ugly wood or a bunch of AR parts are strapped to it. Other times they just look like this.
The more I work with the AK the more I like it. It’s just simple. The handling ergonomics aren’t very good, but you can train around that and run the gun without much trouble.
Flipping the selector lever all the way down, you get semi-auto fire, but if you go half way up, the gun gets really fun and comes into its own. On full auto, the gun becomes what it was designed to be, a lightweight battle rifle. Firing the gun brings back images of great battles fought and those still to fight.
As an open field battle rifle, it may be one of the best ever made. It does everything exceptionally well. It’s a jack-of-all-trades but master of none. As an all around combat arm, it’s a great rifle and I wouldn’t feel outgunned if I was issued one. If you ever get a chance, shoot one. They are a living piece of history and a lot of fun to shoot.
PKM Medium Machine Gun
The PKM is right up there with the AK for ugliness. It’s just ugly. It’s counterpart, an M240 looks sleek, mean, and ready for battle. The PKM looks old and pieced together with spare parts.
When I was initially issued one for base defense and then taught how to use it, I was thinking, “Holy crap we are in trouble, there’s no way that things is going to work.” But they do. It fires a 7.62x54R round that has the ballistics of a 30-06 round and is about the same size. Because of that, the gun has an incredibly long firing stroke that makes it very controllable, and being made out of stamped parts, it feels like the entire gun bends under recoil. The firing impulse is really different than an American or German made machine gun.
The action is completely backwards from the American weapon. That’s how I remembered how to load and shoot it. With an American machine gun, you load the weapon “brass to the grass” pulling the belt through the left to right side of the weapon and then it ejects out the right side and bottom (in the case of the M240). The Russian designed weapon was completely backwards. Put the brass of the round facing up, and load it through the right side.
The belt on the PKM is made up of steel cups that hold the round in. American weapons the belt comes apart as you fire. The Russian weapon stays as one big part and comes out the gun as one.
Loading the belt is pretty cool.
The weapon needs a belt loader with it. The loader itself looks like a meet grinder. You dump the rounds in the top (doesn’t matter which way, the machine fixes it), put the belt in the side, and turn the crank. It is super easy and so cool, we all stood in line to get a chance to fill the belt full of ammo that we got to shoot.
The weapon works by pulling a round out of the belt backwards as the bolt goes backward. That round gets pulled out of the belt and then falls into the chamber below. It sits there in the feed area until you pull the trigger. The trigger releases the bolt forward, chambers the round and fires it. On recoil, the gas system works like a big AK, unlocks and pushes the long piston and bolt backwards, ejecting the spent casing and stripping the next round off the belt to fire. The fun part is the ejection port cover. The cover opens and closes with the bolt moving back and forth, it’s kind of fun to watch. The little door opens, spits out a case, and then closes again. Check out the slow motion video from Forgotten Weapons.
M249 SAW (Squad Automatic Weapons)
Maybe the best machine gun in the American military is being phased out. It’s being replaced by an M16A1 (or at least a shorter version of it). Can you tell I don’t like the change?
The weapon itself is a light machine gun, fires from the open bolt, uses disintegrating belts or can be fired from a standard AR magazine. A SAW with a 200 round belt is one hell of a formidable weapon on the battlefield. One of the critiques of the weapon is that it only fires a 5.56mm round just like an M4, but that is one of it’s greatest assets. The ammo is light, a soldier or Marine can actually carry a large amount of ammo and the gun. Medium and heavy machine guns require a team to carry the weapon and ammo. As a Marine carrying ammo for a weapon, you don’t get to shoot, that sucks. But in reality, that’s a lot of extra people you have to support for one weapon system on the battlefield.
The weapon itself operates and looks like a shrunk down version of an M240, even FN when they originally designed it, called it the Mini. Since the action and operation is the same, training for both systems works really well and is simple. There are a few differences, but once you can run one system, you can run the other.
The weapon fires from the open bolt. Open the feed tray cover, put the belt in (backwards from the Russian PKM) from the right, brass down, close the cover, pull the bolt back and you are ready to rock. The gun cycles around 800-1000 rounds per minute. That’s pretty fast for a machine gun shooting a rifle round. It’s one of the reasons I like it.
Shooting the gun is very controllable. The 5.56 round doesn’t recoil a lot, the gas system and the way the gun is designed and weighted seems to take most of the recoil. If you can hold the gun up you can fire it full auto without problems.
Shouldering it isn’t impossible while standing, but it’s much more fun to shoot from the hip. With the standard military belt with tracers in it, shooting from the hip is easy. You can hit anything very easily out to at least 100 yards form the hip. Just watch where the tracers go. You have to fire at least 5 rounds at a time to get a tracer so it makes you fire more rounds, which generally means more fun, and is more rounds down range in a fight. Surprisingly, when training Marines, Army, and contractors to use a SAW, getting them to fire a lot of rounds is the hardest part.
MP5
Another famous sub-machine gun is the MP5 by H&K. It was a huge leap forward when it was released. It fired from a closed bolt (which was unusual for a machine gun at the time) and was very accurate (also really unusual for a sub-machine gun at the time). It fires from 30 round curved magazines (different than everything at the time) and cycled at an impossible 1200 RPM. The gun dumps rounds fast and with closed bolt, it is one of the most controllable full auto weapons I’ve ever fired. If you stand and hold the gun right, you can keep hand-sized groups on targets at 10 yards without much difficulty.
As you can see, the cycle rate is fast but the gun hardly moves. It’s the reason it was the standard for law enforcement and special teams for a long time. It’s just a joy to shoot and a mechanical marvel. It even looks cool!
The Future
Right now I want to fire two more guns full auto that I haven’t gotten a chance. One is the Kriss Vector. I’ve handled it and played with it, but want to shoot one full auto and see if the system really works as well as advertised.
The other is from LWRC M6A4. It’s a large M4 style gun that fires semi and full auto. The beauty of this weapon is that it fires semi from the closed bolt and full auto from the open bolt.
What Machine Guns have you fired? Which one is your favorite? What’s on your wish list to run on full auto?
Stay Safe,
Ben