Keeping it weird – The most bizarre features on military firearms

A military rifle needs to be reliable and accurate and work in a wide variety of situations; that typically means it’s going to be a fairly standard weapon.

However, that’s not always the case.

Sometimes, you take a fairly standard weapon and attach some silly stuff to it. So today, let’s enjoy some of the weirdest features, attachments, and more we can find on military firearms.

The Israeli Galil and its bottle opener

The Israelis have a history of producing well-made, innovative firearms for both domestic use and export. The Uzi is a legend; the Tavor has been adopted around the world; and the Galil mixes some of the best features of modern military forces… with a bottle opener.

In fact, you might argue that Israel created a bottle opener that just happened to shoot bullets (and which inspired this article).

This feature came into being because Israeli forces were breaking magazine feed lips using them to open bottles.

To avoid this, the Galil ARM model had a built-in bottle opener at the front of the handguard. This way soldiers could open their sodas without wrecking magazine feed lips.

Why not just use a bottle opener, you might ask?

Well, Israel’s reserves commonly carry rifles out and about while living their life, so it seemed easier to give them a bottle opener they’ll always have when carrying their rifle.

The Turkish suicide-prevention trigger

This takes a bit of a dark turn. The number of suicides in the Turkish military in the 1990s – and even into the 2010s – exploded. At one point, soldiers committed suicide at a rate 2.5 times higher than the general population. Common reasons were abuse suffered at the hands of senior soldiers and the fact that service in Turkey is conscription-based.

To address the problem, the Turkish military took several steps, although their effectiveness is up for debate. One thing it did was fit the issued G3 rifle with a trigger guard. The trigger guard allowed the soldier to fire the weapon when shouldered, but from any other angle accessing the trigger would be impossible.

The effectiveness of this tool seems ridiculous and seemed to be a band-aid created by an underlying toxic culture within the Turkish military. It reeks of bureaucratic incompetence and institutional cowardice.

Related: These are the 7 standout combat shotguns from around the world

China’s Type 80 knife stock

The Chinese like to get weird and seem to have a need to arm each type of soldier with an a different type of firearm. (These days they might have standardized a bit more, but that was not always the case.)

The Type 80 machine pistol was designed as a personal defense weapon intended for officers, armored crews, and special operations forces. The Chinese took a lot of inspiration for the German M712 Schnellfeuer, which was a select fire, magazine fed, 7.62x25mm Tokarev, machine pistol. However, the M712 was not a very good gun and overheated within the first magazine.

Since the Type 80 was a close-combat weapon, China produced a close-combat stock for it. But they took it to the next level… and created a stock that doubles as a knife!

The knife blade was sheathed by the stock, and the knife’s handle was the portion of the stock that sits against your shoulder. The knife blade rotates upward, and boom, you stay in the fight after your crappy machine pistol overheats.

The Arisaka’s anti-air sights

The anti-aircraft sights on an Type 99 rifle. (Photo by WardenWolf/WIkimedia Commons)

Optimism. The Japanese must have been full of optimism when they designed the Arisaka Type 99 rifle in 1939. Fielded throughout World War II, it was a fairly basic bolt-action battle rifle typical of the era: wood stock, full handguard, bayonet ready, and firing a full powered 7.7mm cartridge.

However, it had one weird, oddly optimist, feature: the gun had built in anti-aircraft sights.

While planes flew and fought at much lower altitudes at the time, the idea of a soldier hitting a moving plane with a bolt-action rifle seems absolutely absurd.

The sights featured calipers on the sides which were used to determine aircraft speed. The only way I could see this working is through massed fire, but even then a machine gun is a much better option. If only there was a translated training manual to see how the sighs were supposed to work.

Another gun

Soldier with M26-MASS mounted onto an M4 in underbarrel configuration. Note that this M26-MASS is missing the front sight folded over the barrel. (U.S. Army/Nemo5576)

The U.S., keeping with its cowboy history, has one of the most uniquely American firearm attachments – a whole shotgun!

This has been created twice. Αs part of the Knight’s Armament Company Masterkey program, in the 1980s, a Remington 870 pump-action shotgun was attached to standard rifles. And during the Global War on Terror, C-More Systems created the M26 MASS, a shotgun that could be attached to the M16, M4, or other rifles.

The idea is pretty simple: You have a rifle for fighting, but an under-mounted shotgun for breaching doors.

However, neither of these systems ever saw a lot of use. It’s known that at least a few of these weapons bounced around Delta Force, but they don’t seem to have been used all that often. It turns out there are often better methods to breach a door than firing a shotgun and if you need a shotgun it’s just easier to carry it as a separate weapon.

So these are the weirdest, oddest, and strangest firearm features and attachments I could find on military weapons. Some were more surprising than others. With that said, the knife stock is my favorite, but if I were in the desert and the only thing between me and a cold Coke was a locked-in cap, then give me that Galil.

Feature Image: An M4 rifle with an XM26 LSS attachment. (U.S. Army)

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