The Top 5 Most Iconic Firearms

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Icon—noun--A person or thing regarded as a representative symbol or as worthy of veneration.

The traditional origins of the term “icon” orbited around an image of either Jesus Christ or a saint in Eastern Orthodox churches. Over time, the term morphed to mean any object that held particular cultural or historical significance. Among the expansive pantheon of modern firearms, certain examples are indeed icons.

Adequately cataloguing the most significant firearms of the modern age would require a river of ink. More competent wordsmiths than I have done just that. My goal today is simply to hit some high points. The weapons that were chosen here made the cut not because of their impact on the modern battlefield or any particular notoriety. These guns were simply trendsetters. These were all firearms that changed the course of weapons development. Today’s current crop of tactical guns draws inspiration from such as this.

The 1851 Colt Navy

The story goes that a young Sam Colt embarked on the Brig Corvo to explore the world as a junior seaman. Along the way, he purportedly took inspiration from the vessel’s capstan and carved a wooden model of a repeating handgun with a revolving cylinder. Once he got home, Colt capitalized the idea and subsequently changed the world. Colonel Colt’s many-splendored wheelguns ushered in a new generation in man-portable firepower. The 1851 Colt Navy was not his first, but it was arguably his most influential.

The originals were chambered in .36-caliber and sported a six-shot cylinder. Each chamber was loaded individually via a pivoting rammer. Production ran from 1851 through 1873. The gun saw widespread use on both sides of the American Civil War and was also produced under license in London. More than a quarter million copies rolled off the lines.

Reloading was still a bit tedious, particularly by modern standards. However, Rollin White, an industrious employee of Colt’s, purportedly took a pair of reject 1851 cylinders off of the production line, welded them together, and created the first bored-through cartridge-firing revolver. The subsequent 1873 Peacemaker helped tame the American West and led to countless millions of combat wheelguns.

The German P08 Parabellum Luger

Georg Luger was tasked with peddling the Borchardt C-93 to the Swiss military for Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionsfabriken or DWM. The autoloading C-93 was a groundbreaking design, but it suffered from poor reliability, undue complexity, and astronomical cost. Luger took the basic toggle-action design and transformed it into something tactically useful.

The basic action of the P08 Luger was inspired by the human knee joint. You can take an unloaded example, press the muzzle against a firm surface, and see how the action operates. A recoil-driven design, there is a cam surface built into the frame that engages the toggle ears and breaks the action upward for extraction and ejection of empty cases. A spring in the butt then returns the action into battery, stripping a fresh cartridge from the magazine in the process. The standard P08 feeds from an eight-round magazine and sports an unnecessarily-mushy single-action trigger.

The Parabellum pistol came in 4, 6, and 8-inch barrel lengths. The short version was the general infantry pistol. The 6-inch gun was the Navy model optimized for use by U-boat captains against enemy vessels. The long-barreled 8-inch Artillery model was intended as a Personal Defense Weapon of sorts when used with a detachable buttstock and 34-round drum magazine. 

Curiously, the Luger pistol enjoys the same aggressively-swept grip-to-frame angle as the modern Glock family of handguns. This geometry best places the line of recoil colinear with the shooter’s arm. However, it still seems a bit weird for corn-fed Americans raised on the 1911.

The Luger was a ground-breaking pistol that became the alpha souvenir for American servicemen in both world wars. However, it was expensive and fairly susceptible to battlefield crud. Regardless, the Luger signaled the dawn of the autoloader in military service.

The Colt M1911

There are die-hard American shooters who revere the M1911 handgun more than they might their own mothers. The M1911 could rightly be categorized as the world’s first true military fighting pistol. That all began with a cartridge.

US forces battling the Moro tribesmen during the Philippine Insurrection found that their .38-caliber revolvers lacked the horsepower to reliably put radical Islamists down. Considering these lunatics tended to tie wet leather thongs around their nutsacks that shrank as they dried made them veritable berserkers in action. Famed American gun designer John Moses Browning subsequently designed the big fat .45ACP round as well as the inimitably manly gun that fired it.

While European militaries were satisfied to field 9mm handguns firing 115-grain FMJ bullets, John Browning’s .45 simply doubled it. Those massive nearly-half inch copper-jacketed slugs meant not having to say you’re sorry in any of the world’s common languages. The M1911 pistol that Browning designed to launch them oozed pure unfiltered testosterone.

The M1911 fed from a 7-round box magazine and sported a most divine single-action trigger. The sights were too small, but everybody’s sights were too small back then. The M1911 set a standard for both reliability and combat effectiveness that allow it to remain in service with both military and civilian shooters even today.

The M1911 was slightly upgraded to the M1911A1 in 1924. The differences invovled minor tweaks to the frame, mainspring housing, trigger, hammer spur, and sights. M1911 pistols served with distinction during WW1 and then afterwards in the hands of some of America’s most notorious prohibition-era criminals. Browning’s M1911 soldiered on as America’s primary combat handgun from 1911 though 1985. I’m old enough to have been issued an M1911A1 back when I first donned the uniform. It will always been a perennial personal fave.

The FG42

The high end of production estimates for the radically-advanced WW2 FG42 paratroop rifle was only about 7,000 copies. By contrast, we produced some 6 million M1 Carbines. At the height of production we were churning out 65,000 carbines per day. However, the FG42, in addition to being a truly revolutionary design, went on to inspire subsequent weapons still in use today.

The FG42 was designed to replace the rifle, submachine gun, and light machinegun in German Fallschirmjager combat formations. The gun fed from the left via a 20-round box magazine. It fired from the closed bolt in semiauto and the open bolt on rock and roll. There were lots of sub-variants, but most modern gun nerds only recognize two. 

The Type I featured a pressed steel buttstock and a sharply-swept pistol grip optimized for walking fire from the hip. The Type 2 incorporated wooden furniture and a more conventional polymer grip. Both weapons included a folding steel bipod, though the bipod legs folded in opposite directions for each model.

Though effective for its intended role, the FG42 was really too heavy to be an SMG and too light to serve as a machinegun. Rare transferable examples cost hundreds of thousands of dollars today. My spot-on live-fire replicas came from SMG Guns in Texas. Despite fading into obscurity, the basic FG42 action saw further application in the American M60 machinegun. The entrails of the Pig bear a striking similarity to those of the WW2-vintage FG42.

The Steyr AUG

Developed back in 1977--the same year the world met the movie Star Wars--the Steyr AUG broke the mold on combat infantry weapons. Such stuff as the bullpup action, integral optical sights, polymer frames, and translucent synthetic magazines all had their genesis with the AUG. The AUG was so advanced that it still holds its own against modern infantry combat weapons in the Information Age.

AUG stands for Armee Universal Gewehr or Army Universal Rifle. The gun can be had with a variety of barrel lengths chambered in 9mm, .40 S&W, 5.56mm, 300BLK, or 7.63x39mm. By mixing and matching components, the AUG can become everything from a pistol-caliber submachine gun up through a bipod-equipped light support weapon.

The controls are as simple as they are revolutionary. Original Steyr AUGs featured a basic crossbolt safety and had the fire selector built into the trigger mechanism. A short pull produced semiauto fire, while a long pull was rock and roll. Some subsequent versions could be set for either full auto or three-round burst and featured a fire selector built into the crossbolt. The AUG served as the standard infantry rifle in Austria, Australia, Ireland, Tunisia, Luxembourg, and Malaysia.

Nowadays, everybody’s guns sport tactical glass, but the AUG was the first. The basic optical sight featured a fixed 1.5X magnification and doubled as a carrying handle. The short-stroke gas piston-driven action is exceptionally reliable, and the modular nature of the design lets the operator swap barrels in the field without tools. The AUG was indeed a harbinger of things to come.

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