The Colt SCAMP: Yesterday’s Pistol of The Future

By Nathaniel F

1969 was a year of great optimism and achievement for the United States. NASA’s space program took humans to the Moon in July of that year, while the Mariner 6 and 7 probes gave humanity its first close look at the planet Mars. The Boeing 747 “Jumbo Jet” took to the skies for the first time in 1969, and that year also marks the sending of the first ARPANET data packet, heralding the very beginning of the Internet age. In 1969, it seemed as though there was nothing that America could not accomplish, if it wanted to.

In the field of small arms development, the air was filled with that same unbridled optimism. In that year, famed pistol manufacturer Colt Industries began to tackle the problem of not just finding a replacement for the aging M1911 handgun, itself a revolutionary Colt product, but totally rethinking what the infantry sidearm should look like. The engineers at Colt set out to make a successful machine pistol that could replace the semi-automatic handgun, as it had replaced the revolver, giving second-line personnel an unprecedented combination of both firepower and convenience. The result of their efforts would be called the Colt SCAMP, or “Small CAliber Machine Pistol”, a small, lightweight select-fire 27-shot .22 caliber pistol with a novel mechanism and excellent recoil compensation…Read the Rest

Source:: The Firearm Blog