The Submachine Gun

One of the blogs I read every day, is They Make All Kinds.  It's over in the sidebar, easy to find, but today they highlight an archaic, historical weapon, the German MP 3008 submachine gun.

Yeah, I took the pic directly from their site.

This is one of the many submachine guns produced by the warring nations during WWII.  The Brits had the Sten, the Americans had the M3, and the Germans had the MP 40.

Another last-ditch weapon produced to arm German National Militia units. The MP 3008 submachine gun was developed and manufactured during final stages of the World War 2. It is also known as "Volks Machinenpistole" (People's submachine gun). Several German factories, as well as smaller shops, produced about 10,000 (?) of these MP 3008 submachine guns in several minor variations, with several types of buttstocks, including metallic skeletonized or tubular butts, or simple wooden butts. 

All these little guns are pretty much alike.  Simple, rugged, blowback actions.  They are all a lot of fun to shoot.  I admit no experience with any but the M3 that I was issued as a tanker, but I'm pretty sure that they are all a lot of fun, spraying bullets nilly-willy across the landscape.  They were also extremely inexpensive to produce. By inexpensive, I'm told that the US had less than $25.00 in each copy of the M3 in the original contract.

That's cheap shooting.  I'd love to have a sack full of M3s, or for that matter a sack full of MP 3008s.  I imagine that I could have a lot of fun teaching the grandkids about submachine guns.