We often hear about people talking about a gun they don’t like and they will proudly proclaim it to be “The Worst Gun Ever.”  I’ve heard this a lot this last while… and it’s become irritating.  No, Sir.  That is not the worst gun ever.  By comparison that gun you dislike, the Micro Eagle, The High Point, the Taurus… whatever Taurus you have… Is a Marvel of Engineering and Manufacturing when you consider the gun that truly was The Worst Gun Ever.

The Chauchat was designed by a Frenchman who looked at other guns and took ideas from several other guns… then put them all together with the aide of economical French manufacturing. Individual concepts of the design worked, before they were combined. Like Mustard and Chocolate… great with other things, but not together. That was the heart of the Chauchat. And then take those things and make them as poorly as possible.

This gun used any excuse to Jam.  Like a critically lazy teenager, you couldn’t do anything to make it run.  The gun used a long recoil action, open magazines, and poor ergonomics.  In WWI Trench Warfare, this was completely the wrong approach for… anything.  If it got dirty, it would stop working.  If it got too hot, it would stop working.  And when it did get too hot… and by hot I mean slightly warmer than a couple magazines worth, the bolt wouldn’t go forward to chamber a round.  You had to let it cool off for 10 minutes.  Nothing better than a Malf that takes 10 minutes to clear.  Even when it did run, for those brief moments of effort, the gun was notoriously inaccurate. It patterned like a shotgun, but not where you wanted the shots to go. So yeah, the gun was completely useless.  The French, knowing the gun was crap, didn’t like to use them themselves.  So they pawned them off on other countries, including Americans who went to fight in WW First. The Americans tried to chamber it for .30-06, and that somehow only made matters worse. Oh, and recoil would make the gun shake its self to death and it would come apart if the parts didn’t just break apart. Yeah, it was that bad.

Bad quality of materials, bad manufacturing, and a bad design… That was the Chauchat. The Worst Gun In The World.

The French should stick to Fashion Designs.

Okay… no… they shouldn’t do that either.