Why Lawmen Carried the Winchester 1907 the Army Never Adopted
Ivan Jackson
19,694 views
The United States Army looked at the Winchester 1907 and said no. That same rifle ended up in the hands of Border Patrolmen who bought it with their own wages and carried it into gunfights that came, by one lawman's count, every seventeen days. The thing that failed the Army's test was the exact thing that kept those men alive.
In this video:
Why Thomas Crossley Johnson, Winchester's chief designer after John Browning's bitter departure in 1905, was tasked with building an entire self-loading rifle line under enormous pressure to prove the company could survive without its legend
The Army's non-negotiable demand for a semi-automatic rifle firing the full-power .30-06, a requirement the 1907's simple blowback action could never physically meet
Why the rifle initially flopped commercially as a hunting gun, priced well above the beloved Winchester 1894 lever gun that hunters already trusted
The core mechanical tradeoff explained plainly: blowback simplicity bought at the cost of only handling a modest cartridge, the exact same design choice the Army rejected and Border Patrol officer Charles Askins Jr. came to love
Askins' own documented record of 238 gunfights in the El Paso district between 1924 and 1933, and why a light, fast, modest-recoil self-loader was exactly right for combat measured in feet, not football fields
The surprising, underreported reality that the Army did use the 1907, arming Manhattan Project security guards at Oak Ridge and various prisons and state police well into the 1970s
How France and Britain adopted the 1907 far earlier and more dramatically than most people know, including converting French contract rifles to select-fire with 15-20 round magazines, and arming British Royal Flying Corps observers with it as one of the earliest weapons carried into aerial combat
How the same rifle turned up on both sides of Prohibition-era crime, found in Dillinger gang arsenals and associated with Machine Gun Kelly's circle
The honest complication: Remington's Model 8, designed by Browning himself, was mechanically superior and more powerful, meaning the 1907 won its place through handling and simplicity rather than raw performance
The Army's own postwar reversal: after WWI analysis showed real combat happened under 500 yards and the full-power .30-06 was more than necessary, only for General MacArthur to kill the resulting intermediate-cartridge program in 1932 and send the M1 Garand back to full power for logistics reasons, not technical ones
The direct lineage connecting Johnson's original medium-power cartridge family to the .30 Carbine round used in over six million M1 Carbines issued in World War Two
Why serious firearms historians and journals have credited Johnson's short, select-fire, medium-cartridge, detachable-magazine design as an essential conceptual ancestor of the assault rifle, decades before Germany's Sturmgewehr claimed that title
The quiet irony that despite being vindicated by history, the 1907 remains a footnote at gun shows today, valued below flashier lever guns from the same era
The argument between the desk and the alley, between defining a weapon by its cartridge or by whether it keeps you alive, never really ended. Every modern police carbine, short and light and firing a medium cartridge from a detachable magazine, is that argument finally settled in the alley's favor. It just took most of a century, and nobody put Askins' name on it.
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Military weapons have to be simple and tough just like the soldiers that have to use them.
Why Lawmen Carried the Winchester 1907 the Army Never Adopted
Ivan Jackson
19,694 views
The United States Army looked at the Winchester 1907 and said no. That same rifle ended up in the hands of Border Patrolmen who bought it with their own wages and carried it into gunfights that came, by one lawman's count, every seventeen days. The thing that failed the Army's test was the exact thing that kept those men alive.
In this video:
Why Thomas Crossley Johnson, Winchester's chief designer after John Browning's bitter departure in 1905, was tasked with building an entire self-loading rifle line under enormous pressure to prove the company could survive without its legend
The Army's non-negotiable demand for a semi-automatic rifle firing the full-power .30-06, a requirement the 1907's simple blowback action could never physically meet
Why the rifle initially flopped commercially as a hunting gun, priced well above the beloved Winchester 1894 lever gun that hunters already trusted
The core mechanical tradeoff explained plainly: blowback simplicity bought at the cost of only handling a modest cartridge, the exact same design choice the Army rejected and Border Patrol officer Charles Askins Jr. came to love
Askins' own documented record of 238 gunfights in the El Paso district between 1924 and 1933, and why a light, fast, modest-recoil self-loader was exactly right for combat measured in feet, not football fields
The surprising, underreported reality that the Army did use the 1907, arming Manhattan Project security guards at Oak Ridge and various prisons and state police well into the 1970s
How France and Britain adopted the 1907 far earlier and more dramatically than most people know, including converting French contract rifles to select-fire with 15-20 round magazines, and arming British Royal Flying Corps observers with it as one of the earliest weapons carried into aerial combat
How the same rifle turned up on both sides of Prohibition-era crime, found in Dillinger gang arsenals and associated with Machine Gun Kelly's circle
The honest complication: Remington's Model 8, designed by Browning himself, was mechanically superior and more powerful, meaning the 1907 won its place through handling and simplicity rather than raw performance
The Army's own postwar reversal: after WWI analysis showed real combat happened under 500 yards and the full-power .30-06 was more than necessary, only for General MacArthur to kill the resulting intermediate-cartridge program in 1932 and send the M1 Garand back to full power for logistics reasons, not technical ones
The direct lineage connecting Johnson's original medium-power cartridge family to the .30 Carbine round used in over six million M1 Carbines issued in World War Two
Why serious firearms historians and journals have credited Johnson's short, select-fire, medium-cartridge, detachable-magazine design as an essential conceptual ancestor of the assault rifle, decades before Germany's Sturmgewehr claimed that title
The quiet irony that despite being vindicated by history, the 1907 remains a footnote at gun shows today, valued below flashier lever guns from the same era
The argument between the desk and the alley, between defining a weapon by its cartridge or by whether it keeps you alive, never really ended. Every modern police carbine, short and light and firing a medium cartridge from a detachable magazine, is that argument finally settled in the alley's favor. It just took most of a century, and nobody put Askins' name on it.