![]() It was a far cry from today’s consolidated market, where much of the world is content buying ARs and AKs from distant lands. “Thanks for your M1s, but we need a French rifle as soon as possible/” Indeed, in the fifteen years after World War II, many more nations than are in the business today developed their own firearms, even small nations like Indonesia, Egypt, and the Dominican Republic. Some nations, like France, developed their own rifles in pursuit of national independence. Or free. The United States had literally millions of surplus M1s, and they rearmed many of the nations of Europe, giving guns in hopes of gaining influence - or as a reward for wartime alliances. ![]() But that case, assuming arguendo that it was strong when the cost of an M1 equaled the cost of an FN 49, was appreciably weaker and harder to make when the M1s were flowing at one-half, one-quarter, one-tenth of the cost of new production. An FN salesman could, were he worthy of the name at all, make a case that the SAFN was a better rifle than an M1, or the Mausers still used around the world at the time. One benefit of this long gestation was that the SAFN was rather thoroughly debugged when it shipped, and it suffered fewer of the teething problems that other rifles that had had a more direct path to production, like the Tokarev, the M1 Garand, or even the AK, did.īut, it launched into a market saturated with high-quality arms that were surplus to the needs of downsizing military victors (and entirely-disarmed vanquished). ![]() But even as clean-up and restoration continued, he worked to bring his long-delayed semi-auto rifle design to life. Saive returned to an FN whose only boast was that it was less destroyed that most other Continental gun factories, despite the consequences of Allied bombing and German looting. Some of these prototypes still exist today, but the British Army was never serious about a semi-auto during the war British soldiers and leaders were happy with the old reliable Enfield bolt action. But its development took longer than planned and was interrupted by war - its designer exiled, its plans hidden, and then, its manufacturer in ruins and needing to rebuild.ĭuring his exile, Dieudonné Saive supervised the construction of over 50 prototypes of versions of the rifle that later would become the SAFN, for his British hosts at Enfield. ![]() If the FN Model 1949, also called the SAFN (Semi-Automatic FN), had been, as intended, the FN 36, or at least the FN 38, it might have changed the world. ![]()
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