Cool Creator Spotlight: Forgotten Weapons

Ian McCollum has both a dedicated Forgotten Weapons website and a YouTube channel. Also visit Headstamp Publishing, the publishing house he founded with N.R. Jenzen-Jones and James Rupley. Jonathan Ferguson, Keeper of Firearms & Artillery at the Royal Armouries Museum and Youtube content creator worth checking out in his own right is a technical advisor for that project.

His videos are quite professional nowadays with good audio and nice visuals, but the earliest videos still on YouTube date back to 2011. While the presentation is less than stellar, the glimpses into design and history are still there. This one is pretty bad, but interesting nonetheless if you are familiar with firearms, and Ian did a much more complete video later. He tends to do that if something is incomplete, or if new information comes to light.

Modern Forgotten Weapons videos may include historical context, pop culture examples, engineering principles, explanations of what went wrong with the design, and even demonstrations at a range or in a full competition scenario. YouTube doesn't like people to even fire machine guns on screen anymore, but many military and civilian arms are still able to be presented thoroughly despite the current content restrictions. And sometimes there are just insane rifles to show off.

Ian is a self-admitted Francophile when it comes to firearms, and many of his videos are dedicated to the small arms of France from the Lebel to the modern day, including this look at the GIGN sniper revolver made by Manurhin.

He also visits museums and manufacturers for exclusive looks at prototypes and experimental oddities. His reputation gets him access to all kinds of crazy sources. If you're curious about a gun from a film or video game, he probably covered it at some point, so search his sites and see what you can find!

This barely scratches the surface, and doesn't even discuss his collaborations with other gun-tubers like C&Rsenal, and InRangeTV. There's a reason he is nicknamed "Gun Jesus" by others in the firearm community, as he has been writing and recording firearm info for a long time. If firearm technology interests you in the slightest, take a look at all of the above!