Machine Gun News: The Magazine for Full-Auto Enthusiasts; Volume 8, No. 6, November 1994

The format is approximately 8.25 inches by 11 inches. 64 pages, including covers. Illustrated covers. Illustrations. Tabular Data. Among the topics covered are: An ATF Internal Document, The Smooth Bore H&R Handy-Gun by Eric Larson; Model "1" Sales by Dan Shea; An Up-Reising! by Frank Iannamico; The Interview: Peter G. Kokalis; D-Day Reenactment by William Conville. Peter Kokalis was born on June 20, 1934 in Chicago and graduated from Northwestern University and later served his country as a member of the US Army. In 1962, the family moved to Phoenix. Peter found a calling as a photojournalist and worked as an editor for Soldier of Fortune and Firearms News, authoring hundreds of articles over 35 years. Peter was an avid reader and collector of military memorabilia. William Conville provided the nicely illustrated article on the D-Day Reenactment held at Fort Story, Virginia on the 50th anniversary of the assault. A machine gun (MG) is a fully automatic and rifled firearm designed for sustained direct fire. Automatic firearms of 0.79 inches caliber or more are classified as autocannons rather than machine guns. As a class of military kinetic projectile weapons, machine guns are designed to be mainly used as infantry support weapons and generally used when attached to a bipod or tripod, a fixed mount or a heavy weapons platform for stability against recoil. Many machine guns also use belt feeding and open bolt operation, features not normally found on other infantry firearms. Machine guns can be further categorized as light machine guns, medium machine guns, heavy machine guns, general-purpose machine guns, and squad automatic weapons. Unlike semi-automatic firearms, which require one trigger pull per round fired, a machine gun is designed to continue firing for as long as the trigger is held down. Nowadays, the term is restricted to relatively heavy crew-served weapons, able to provide continuous or frequent bursts of automatic fire for as long as ammunition feeding is replete. Machine guns are used against infantry, low-flying aircraft, small boats and lightly/unarmored land vehicles, and can provide suppressive fire (either directly or indirectly) or enforce area denial over a sector of land with grazing fire. They are commonly mounted on fast attack vehicles such as technicals to provide heavy mobile firepower, armored vehicles such as tanks for engaging targets too small to justify the use of the primary weaponry or too fast to effectively engage with it, and on aircraft as defensive armament or for strafing ground targets, though on fighter aircraft true machine guns have mostly been supplanted by large-caliber rotary guns. Some machine guns have in practice sustained fire almost continuously for hours; other automatic weapons overheat after less than a minute of use. Because they become very hot, the great majority of designs fire from an open bolt, to permit air cooling from the breech between bursts. They also usually have either a barrel cooling system, slow-heating heavyweight barrel, or removable barrels which allow a hot barrel to be replaced. Although subdivided into "light", "medium", "heavy" or "general-purpose", even the lightest machine guns tend to be substantially larger and heavier than standard infantry arms. Medium and heavy machine guns are either mounted on a tripod or on a vehicle; when carried on foot, the machine gun and associated equipment (tripod, ammunition, spare barrels) require additional crew members. Light machine guns are designed to provide mobile fire support to a squad and are typically air-cooled weapons fitted with a box magazine or drum and a bipod; they may use full-size rifle rounds, but modern examples often use intermediate rounds. Medium machine guns use full-sized rifle rounds and are designed to be used from fixed positions mounted on a tripod. The term heavy machine gun originated in World War I to describe heavyweight medium machine guns, and persisted into World War II with.…