A hundred and twelve years ago, in 1907...our great grandparents were first able to buy the rifle pictured. The semi-auto Winchester Model 1907.

This is a gun they could buy from a Sears catalogue and have delivered via US Post. It was/ is a semi-automatic, high powered centerfire rifle, with detachable, high capacity magazine.

About 400,000 semi-automatic rifles were produced before WW2. Civilians had hundreds of thousands of these for 40 years, while US soldiers were still being issued old fashioned bolt action rifles.

The 1907 fired just as fast as an AR15 or AK47 and the bullet (.351 Winchester) was actually larger than those fired by the more modern looking weapons..

The ONLY functional difference between the 1907 and a controversial and much feared AR15 is the modern black plastic stock.

The semi auto, so-called "assault rifle" is 110 years old. It isnt new in any way.

The semi auto rifle was not a weapon of war. The government MADE IT a weapon of war 40 years after civilians had them.

The semi-auto can be safely owned by civilians. The proof is that literally 3 generations of adults owned and used them responsibly and no one ever even noticed.

Want to fix the horror of mass shootings? Fix the things that have changed for the worse in the last 50 years. Family Values, Spanking Kids, Morals, What is socially acceptable, ect., because the rifle technology in question was here long before this insanity .

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An old low pressure design. Used an inertia block in forend instead bolt locking into barrel or receiver. John Browning probably had the(Remington) mdl 8 & 812 on the market by then.

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Seems I've read that the designer was handicapped by various patents when he designed this one but Winchester wanted a semi-auto to market. But the point is taken that semi-autos have been around for a while.

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Well said Puller, well said! All my very Best my Friend, Joe.

I agree with you for the most part.

When I was in grade school pretty much all the boys and more than a few of the girls carried a knife. The 3.75” Buck 110 was more or the less the benchmark. No one ever got stabbed or cut. We had our share of playground fights but we all knew you didn’t settle grievances, disagreements, or impugned honor with a weapon. It would not have been honorable or socially acceptable.

We also brought BB guns and .22 LR rifles that we’d gotten for Christmas or birthdays for show and tell. I started shooting when I was 6 and was hunting rabbits and prairie dogs independently at age 8 as did most other kids so we did indeed have guns at show and tell ages. Yet, no one got shot.

Since our school was in a small community it was one long school where you entered the south end in Kindergarten and progressed further north every year through elementary, junior high, and high school.

NRA Hunter safety courses were held on campus - in between the the junior high and elementary section where we as 12 years olds and 6th grades were ready to transition to something bigger - both Junior High and deer and antelope hunting where the Hunter Safety course was required to hunt larger game at that age. A variety of semi auto handguns, revolvers, single shot, bolt action and semi-auto rifles, lever action rifles, and break open, pump action and semi auto shotguns were brought into the school with no scrutiny from (totally non existent) security. And no one ever got shot.

From junior high on as we become old enough to drive, a large percentage of our vehicles had guns in them, often in gun racks in unlocked pickup trucks so that we could go hunting before and/or after school. Again, no one got shot, or even threatened with a gun

On the North end of the school building was the gym. It was left open, unlocked and unattended every evening until 9pm. The rules were simple. The first time there was a fight, the balls didn’t get put away or the floors didn’t get swept it would locked up tight right after school and stay that way. That never happened while I was there.

The school principal would commission the wood shop class to make a paddle at the start of every year and within a week or two after, it would get used. Years later I worked with that same principal as he’d taken a retirement job in the same agency I was in. He confirmed my suspicions that the paddle was mostly for show. He said the first year he spanked a kid with one, his secretary asked of she should close the door and his response was “No!!! I’d won’t do any good unless the rest of the kids know about it”. And it worked as one a year was all that was needed.

He was the same principal who opened the gym and he confirmed none of the rules were ever broken until he retired. He couldn’t swear there had never been a fight, but if there had been one, all of the people present kept dead silent about it.

We were all either farm and ranch kids or lived in a town that supported nearby farms and ranches. Hunting was common so even the kids in town were raised to handle guns safely and with respect. They also understood guns were just tools with no inherent evil, but that used improperly or in an unsafe manner, they could be just as deadly as an auger, a power take off, or a corn picker.

I finished high school in an almost identical school in an almost identical town (more ranching, less farming). Between those two schools and the students that attended them, there was 1 suicide and 1 negligent discharge that unfortunately resulted in a death.

The suicide was called a cleaning accident for the mother’s sake, but it doesn’t fool anyone. He was a few years older than me and had worked on my step dad’s farm and ranch for a summer. He had some pretty serious family issues with an alcoholic, abusive and eventually absent father, and carried a lot of baggage from that. My stepdad was quite frankly one of those people who give meaning to the phrase “people don’t quit jobs, they quit bosses”. He didn’t help that kid’s self esteem any. He chose a double barrel shot gun, but it was a lack of mental health screening in the school and a lack of mental health treatment options in the community that killed him, not the shotgun. He was a good kid, he just didn’t feel accepted, and chose to kill himself - and just himself as hurting others wouldn’t have been honorable or acceptable at all.

The negligent discharge was a kid screwing around with a .22LR revolver (most likely a Ruger Single Six, but I never heard for sure as it occurred a few years before I attended). He was trying to draw and spin it, and fire it like someone in a B western and unfortunately did it once with a round still in the cylinder. He was in his living room, shot through the plate glass window, across the street and through another window striking and killing another kid in the head. It was an ND combined with a fluke 1 in a million trajectory that struck someone fatally.

It was a shooting with two victims. It was reckless on his part even though at his young age (under age 12) he would not have foreseen the potential consequences, and people never let him forget it. He also never let himself forget it and it clearly bothered him all through the high school years I knew him. I saw him respond to a post on face book about a decade ago and I visited his page. It was obvious use still has issues. The best thing he could have done was move several states away and start fresh, but he didn’t. Perhaps he still thinks he needs to pay penance for it. Responsibility isn’t something we shirked in that gun culture.

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That’s the good and bad of gun culture as it was then, and it’s the state of a current subset of our gun culture where I depart a bit from the OPs post.

For years I’ve watch gun culture change slowly over time. You don’t have to look far on Facebook or even at all that many pickup trucks to see a deviant gun culture that has developed.

It’s the guy in a plate carrier and a punisher logo ball cap holding his AR-15, AK or other modern military styled semi automatic sporting rifle, looking “cool” and more often than not also saying something stupid on his page like how he wants to “own the _____” or how he’s ready and willing to use his gun to protect his rights or his impugned honor, his confederate flag, or some other variety of horse pucky excuse that suggests it’s ok to use a gun to settle an affront of honor or difference of opinion.

Statements like that would have brought a great deal of scorn and ridicule from the gun culture as it existed even 30 years ago, as well as concern about whether he’s already off his nut.

The 2A demonstrations that occurred several years ago are a good example of that cultural change. When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s years in a farm and ranch environment open carry was common, but not many people went around carrying a long gun and we didn’t do it in people’s businesses as we knew it could make some folks uncomfortable. Fast forward to the (thankfully short lived) 2A demonstration era and making people uncomfortable was the entire point. “I’m gonna exercise mah 2A rights, and if you don’t like it that’s too bad!. Very mature. Very pro social behavior. Naturally the people who’s livelihoods depended on those businesses quickly banned open carry to keep their customer’s who were otherwise uncomfortable with a bunch of pot bellied, plate carrier wearing, neckbearded whack jobs carry guns in Starbucks, Target, Chipotle, etc. It didn’t present the gun community, or gun culture in a flattering light.

None the less for a young person today that deviant offshoot of gun culture carries a powerful cultural message. Add in low self esteem, feelings of lack of control over anything in their lives and suddenly a gun is a way to find acceptable and demonstrate man hood. In extreme cases that angst and frustration at having no control and being unvalued by others turns to anger and a gun becomes a way to get lasting infamy as well as some vengeance.

Now…mass shootings and school shootings are still a mental health problem at their core. However, that deviant toxic masculine subset of gun culture that’s developed can potentially turn kids who in the past may have just shot themselves, into kids that shoot a whole lot of others before shooting themselves. I look back at the kid I knew who shot himself and had we had that same dysfunction “using a gun makes you a man” culture back then, I suspect he just might have gone the school shooting route.

Now….before you start beating the keyboard in your zeal to lecture me on the error of my thinking and flame me for expressing “leftist” thoughts, stop and think about it for a minute.

70% of the kids shooting up schools are just that - kids under age 18. Most of the rest of the mass shooters are also fairly young. Most of them are also male and male brains are slower to develop than female brains. Young men just are far more likely to make rash decisions before age 25 than they are after age 25. That’s partly brain development and partly just having more experience and learning that bad decisions cause bad outcomes and negative consequences.

Cultural messaging like I’ve described above where guns are portrayed as acceptable ways to solve social problems doesn’t change the behavior of older more experienced people. We realize that it just isn’t the way things are done and causes more problems than it solves. The same isn’t always true for a younger person. We separate reality from fantasy much better than they do. They don’t separate the fantasy aspects of it from the reality. Most know that prepping for the zombie apocalypse is just fantasy, but the lines get blurred when it comes to going downtown with a gun looking for trouble during a riot where a more mature person would understand that when you go looking for trouble it will find you.

Similarly the “right” to use lethal force to defend yourself can also blur, until there isn’t much of a firewall preventing you from going Rambo on your perceived tormentors or deciding it’s an acceptable option to use a gun to go out with a bang after shooting a bunch of others to “make your point” that you were in some way wronged.

That’s what we’ve got now.

In addition to a general failure to instill a sense of responsibility in our kids, including a sense of responsibility to look out for everyone in our community and our nation (as opposed to the all to common “screw, you I got mine” attitude that pervades social discourse, politics and governance now), it’s a failure in economic, education and employment policy going back to the start of this century, it’s a failure in access to mental health treatment, and it’s a failure in that deviant gun sub culture that has developed.

We have to own that culture shift and like it or not, we have suppress it when we see it or it’s going to become what everyone views as “gun culture” in America.

The Winchester 1903 in 22 Winchester Automatic was their first semiautomatic rifle, the 1905 was their first centerfire semiautomatic rifle.
The 1907 fired the somewhat more powerful .351SL, roughly equivalent to the 30-30.

There was an earlier version, the Model 1905, chambered for .32 WSL and .35 WSL. The Model 1907 in .351 WSL actually did see some limited military use during WWI by the French, British, and Russians. The final version of that general design was the Model 1910 in .401 WSL, considerably more powerful than any of the earlier WSL cartridges. Those rifles are quite scarce as not many were made. I always wanted one. For some forgotten reason, I did not buy the only really nice Model 1910 I ever ran across, which was about 15 years ago.

Let’s not forget the Remington Model 8 (and the FN Model 1900) long recoil semiauto rifles which came out at about the same time as the Winchester 1907. They also saw some military use but details of it are sparse.

I've got the 1910 Winchester in 401WSL.
1914 vintage. Nice rifle to shoot, accurate, a little hard on the brass though.
I make cases from 7.62x39mm boxer primed Winchester brass (works the best).
I use 41Magnum reloading dies w/an extra tapered case expander made from a 45acp die. I use 41Mag Lead RN bullets.
4227 powder.


....Left to Right
-2 factory .401 rounds
-One of my reloaded .401 using a 7.62x39mm case & 41mag LRN bullet
-Empty 7.62x39 case
-32 WSL round for the 1905 Winchester SLR (uses the same 170gr bullet as the 32 Winchester Special round


I've past up quite few 1907 models and nice 1905. Should've bought at least one of them I guess.
Don't ever lose the magazines from one of these SLRifles. They are like gold.

The rifles are just different enough to be interesting to me.

Here is one of the (I believe) two surviving examples of the approximately 120 Winchester 1907 S.L. rifles procured by the British Royal Flying Corps in the year and a half starting in December 1914. Two additional slightly different prototypes are in the Cody Firearms Museum's collection.

I have a partial Remington Dogbone box (18 rounds) of .401 WSL. The odd thing is that on the back box label is written in grease pencil something like ".15 each". At one time it was not unusual for some stores to sell ammunition by the round. If you thought you needed only five rounds, you could buy five rounds, not the whole box. Back when I was a kid, I remember the local general store selling shotshells that way, like a dime per shell. In one of the earlier editions of The Handloader's Digest (12th edition, 1994) there was a very interesting feature article on reloading the .401 WSL. I think 2400 and 4227 were the recommended propellants.

At a local gun show back in the 90s, I ran across a Model 1905 originally in .32 WSL which had been rechambered to use .30 Carbine. I always wondered if that would have worked without tearing the gun up. I suppose most are aware that the .30 Carbine cartridge was inspired by the .32 WSL cartridge. Much as the 7.62 NATO cartridge (AKA .308 Win) was inspired by the earlier .300 Savage cartridge.

All of these WSL cartridges are available from Buffalo Arms, if you can't find and/or don't want to shoot the vintage stuff. They do limited runs so they're sometimes out of stock but you can put yourself on the "notify me" list for the next batch run.

Local range/ gun shop has a 1910 .401 WSL, part of a large group of consignment rifles and shotguns. Sky high price even with poor finish and previous owner engraved his initials and a number on bottom of receiver.

Excellent Post Puller! This belongs on Facebook and elsewhere so folks not on gun forums can see and mull over.

Indeed , I frequently make the point in conversation/ debate , citing the 115 year history of * Assault Rifles * - ie Semiautomatic , intermediate power ctg , detatchable magazine . (Yes , I'm aware of the 1905 , but draw the distinction of .351 WSL making the grade as an Intermediate Power Ctg in modern context .)

Does the 1907 Win SLR .351cal Police Model fall into the AW catagory somewhere as it has the bayonet attachment on the bbl (takes a Krag Bayonet) ?

Just wondering,,so many laws in different places.

Yes, an AW in NY under SAFE Act. Detachable magazine plus one banned feature (bayonet mount).

I don't know how you happened upon this creative reloading solution. Mine came after letting a friend borrow my 321 SL and two boxes of ammo. He returned with the rifle .... and zero brass.

"Really - you save that stuff?"

I use 5.56 or 300 Blackout necked out to 35 caliber. The 300 Blackout is a tad short, so if full length is desired cutting back 5.56 is better. The rim diameter is not quite there on either, but (especially when using 5.56) the case stays put and I have no misfires.

I still like getting back all my brass and have about 500 rounds of "351/556 SL" loaded for shared shooting. Use a 170 RNL with a slightly more sedate load.

Was that another one of John Browning's inventions?

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The basic design for the Model 1907 is covered by a U.S. Patent assigned to Winchester by Thomas Crossley Johnson, a key firearms designer for Winchester.

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I worked with a machinist that was a functioning alcoholic. He lived alone and never went anywhere except a bar. One time he had car trouble and had to get a ride home. No vehicle and house blacked out he got a visit from local no goods that had been breaking into houses. They broke in and made enough noise to wake owner from stupor. House was 3 bedroom ranch. He emptied two mags out of a 1910, 401 from bedroom. He didn’t hit any of the punks but you can’t believe the damage that 401 caused to house. Going thru walls and plowing into kitchen cabinets full of dishes, what a mess. He had been trying to get off the booze so his wife would come back. This didn’t help.

The .401 WSL has about the same muzzle energy as the factory standard .45-70 loading.

T. C. Johnson was a prolific gun designer for Winchester, and he was pretty good at finding ways to circumvent Browning's patents. This is an article about him.
John Browning's Contemporaries: The Guns of T.C. Johnson -The Firearm Blog

The usual starting point for making .351 WSL brass used to be by modifying .357 Maximum brass by trimming to length and doing a little lathe work on the rim. But I imagine that finding .357 Max brass would be quite a challenge today. I have read that .223/5.56 cases can be converted to .351, and that is probably more feasible. I have not previously heard of converting 7.62x39 cases to .401. I would probably do that if I ever got my hands on a Model 1910 - which is highly doubtful.

I have almost a full box of .351 Remington brand ammo languishing in a drawer. I open to offers.

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The great thing about using 7.62x39 brass for .401 is that they don't need trimming to length after opening them up.
I guess I could take a skim off the mouth of each but I don't.

IIRC a .38spcl/357 shell holder works w/the case.

I use a converted 45acp expander die to open the x39mm case to 41 cal in one pass.
It's simply has the 45cal expander tapered from just under 30cal to 41cal.
One past into the die and the case is opened up.
Then right to the 41Mag dies.

The 41Mag expander opens the case further down so the bullet can be seated.

The initial formed case looks kind of strange as it is 'wasp waist' in shape from the expanders not being able to uniformly shape from the inside.
But that fireforms on the first shot and you get what you see in the previous posted pic.

The 41Mag bullets are a touch oversize at .410 for .401SLR which should use a bullet of .406/.407
That's why I use only lead 41Mag bullets.
When first seated in the case the 41Mag bullet can slighty bulge the case depending on which brass mfg you use.

But the last step is to run the loaded, bulged round back into the FL sizer 41Mag die. An educated depth, enough to resize the bullet and bulged end of the case back down together. I does so very easily.

I have a .400d LEE bullet sizer push thru die that some day I will polish out to .407 so I can size the 41Mag bullets for use. Just never seem to get around to it.
This method works just fine for lead bullets.
I wouldn't use jacketed bullets w/o sizing them down first.

Roll crimp the bullets firmly or recoil will dislodge them during firing. The rifle does kick.

The orig case headspaces on a semi-rim.
The x39 case does have a very slight semi rim,,only about .005. But it's more than enough to do it's job.
I have found Winchester brass the best for this use.
I have also used Sako, but that's too thick in the neck and will need neck reaming.
Something that can be done of course, but I'll save that work for when I run out of Winchester brass.