It was never "Would you choose a Thompson over a Sten?" It was "would you choose a sharpened broom handle over the Sten?" The Sten was born in post-Dunkirk Britain and has a special place in history.
The Sten is crudly made - but pretty well thought-out. It's controlable due to it's low rate of fire - and the stock gets a lot better if you wrap it with something. The Mac-10 (as it is) is very consealable. You can wear it with a sling under your jacket. Naturally - a submachinegun this small (in 9mm) is a lot harder to control. Today, guns like the (smaller caliber) P90 or MP9 are available - decades after the Mac-10 came to be. The Sten is not consealable - but it was never supposed to be. It's a military firearm. And - as you said - it wasn't made to be pretty or fancy. Britain was in dire need of a mass-produceable submachinegun at the time - and the Sten was the best solution available.
I have experience with sten mk2 and m11/9mm. I concede that they are pretty crude. The M11/9mm I have shot the most has so far had about 1 malfunction in 1000 rounds. To me the point is the unfair "law" that makes the better machine guns financially way out of reach. It is just a little bit snobbish to make fun of the lessor sub guns. Really, who can afford $10,000, $20,000, $$40,000+ for a fully automatic gun of any kind.
If they were well looked after (especially the mag lips) and kept clean they were efficient and cheap killers of axis troops! As people were continually told at the time "There's a war on!"
You've probably shot more full auto than the troops that actually carried it in the field. A platoon can only so much ammo, most of that is for the machine guns, and resupply is a "probably, maybe" depending on circumstances. Fire discipline is a real thing.
"The Ingram M-10 is the perfect weapon for a fire fight in a phone booth", was the phrase I'd heard decades ago. Having spent some time with a 45 cal M-10 a long time ago I would choose the Ingram. But, only if it had the Sionics Suppressor on it. With Werbell's "Can" in place, it made the M-10 much more controllable, it the wire stock was extended. Without the "Can" and the stock in place when firing, it was just a "Bullet-hose".
I own an OG MPA10T Mac clone and shoots slightly better than people make it out to be, but not by some crazy amount. The sights are literally a crappy peep hole and a bent sheet metal front post. It’ll still be fist sized accurate up to 25 yards in semi auto though. It’s just really concealable and cool looking so I love it. Plus US machine gun has good aftermarket support for them.
Good morning from south central BC, thanks for the video. One of my handgun shooting mentors was a Canadian Army vet Ernie who ended up in a wheelchair as a result of action in Italy pushing the German army out. One day between silhouette rounds I asked what he was issued for that task and he initially answered a Sten that as Ernie put it, "Sometimes wouldn't shut off". He further described the fighting as "not house to house, but room to room" often. Then after a short pause said to me, "Nothing beat grenades for that and we had a lot of them!". Thanks for the memories from long ago, of great folks who are now gone on before us.
@bc30cal99; My dad was there, too, Sicily first, then up the East coast of Italy...he was a combat engineer, so more "boom" and build, than "tatta-tatta", but picked up an oak leaf during a German mortar attack. Thanks for your memories.
Meanwhile, modern warfare has given people the opposite opinion of grenades. Earl Plumlee said that his grenade fight started when he threw one at the enemy and all it did was remind them that they had grenades too. For every one he threw, half a dozen came back.
I was told the exact same things from my grandad who worked with world war 2 vets in the 1950's-60s and the WW2 vets who were his superiors when he was in Germany as occupational forces in the early-mid 50's. The reason it wouldn't "shut off" is because when dropped, the breech bold would bounce back just enough to grab and chamber a round but not catch the sear.
I’m sure you’re aware, but of course, the point of the sten is not that it’s a great submachinegun. It’s that it’s a submachine gun that works most of the time and you can have them right now, and the Germans might be invading in a few weeks.
I think the Sten does get unfairly maligned sometimes because a lot of people today tend to look at it from a peacetime perspective, whereas when you put it into the wartime context of the time, with a country that's basically the last one standing and has its back against a wall, a gun that works and is available the moment you need it (And which you can produce in the millions even without the USA's absurd industrial capacity) is arguably perfect no matter how basic it is. But that said, it's not wrong to call it the absolute floor of what an SMG should be. This is far more damning of the M10 which has none of the above excuses, was made 20 years later, and still somehow manages to almost be worse 🤣
@@Quintus_Fontane Relavant is that it DOES the bare minimum, many guns fail at even doing that! One comparison I alwasy use is that one MP5 is better than one Sten, but 10 Stens are better than one MP5! Also, a basic gun today is a better weapon than the promise of having a better gun tomorrow!
My grandfather used both the 1928A1 Thompson and the MkII STEN in France. He was trained on both because during Basic in Canada he was trained on the STEN, and the Thompson because he was a Sherman Firefly driver and his tank came equipped with one. He always said he preferred the Thompson (who wouldn't? 😁) but the STEN had its good points too. The STEN was much lighter than the Thompson, and cost much, much less so there were a heck of a lot more of them available to Canadian troops.
@@trooperdgb9722 That is true....but he was a BIG farm boy from the Canadian Prairies so the weight wasn't quite the problem as it was for most soldiers....
That’s the thing. In the case of your grandfather it wasn’t a choice between having a Thompson or a Sten. It was probably choice between having a Webley revolver or a Sten.
@@hastekulvaati9681 IIRC he was issued an Enfield revolver and the Thompson was in the tank for defense against infantry. I'm not sure (and he's long gone now) just how or why he acquired the STEN he had. He probably got it from a wounded infantryman....
As an ex British Soldier I can honestly say that a lot of people would be surprised at the single shot accuracy and range of the Sten up to 200 yds , even the full auto is usable up to 100 yds .
I'd be very surprised if you were old enough to have shot the Sten in the British Army. You might be thinking of the Stirling which replaced the Sten from the 50s to the 60s, and remained in service until the 90s. It has a similar layout, but much better construction.
@@creanero i can remember talking to an old chap who was called up in the latter stages of the war , and his feelings on the sten was that no two shot the same , but if you spent time with the one you were given and got to know where it shot , he claimed in single shot he was good enough to head shoot rabbits up to about 40 yards with it ,
Sterling? Yes. Regularly shot it at Bisley in RASAM to 100m, many years ago. Some firers (Gurkhas, for the most part...) were getting amazing groups with theirs.
The design of the Sten was brilliant for its circumstances. With limited supplies, limited number of good tooling and high demand its a perfect match. Its easy to dismiss it from a modern standpoint or even a contemporary american standpoint, but for a production in whats essentially a warzone with submarines patrolling the seas and bombers flying it's brilliant. Does not need a lot of tooling, can be made by uneducated workers, uses less material and readily available ones and can be made in high numbers quickly. And is still perfectly usable and battle effective. The getmans tried very complicated designs that where objectively better, but they couldn't match the output or keep production up under worsening wartime conditions.
The absolute floor of a functional sub machine gun. One of the few times an army got exactly what it asked for. "We want angry toob." "Here is angry toob."
"I like your simple and affordable design but can it be made simpler?" Asked the Military. "Of course" said the UK's hastily asembled arms industry, "how many do you want?"
In defense of the Ingram I'd mention that I'd much rather have that as a truck driver, armor crew, etc. Its much more compact and it does the job needed, which is spraying bullets at the bad stuff as you run the other way looking for cover. Which for a lot of people thats what "combat" is, they arn't some door kicking specops guy. They are a truck driver that got ambushed and need something small that can spray to hopefully get somewhere safe.
The funny part of that is, the Ingram M-10 was literally _for_ the door-kicking spec ops guy! Let's say I knew a guy who knew guys, and leave it at that. One wore two Ingram M-11 .380s under his armpits, hanging where he could reach up and swivel forwards, with tie-downs holding the muzzles to his belt and loaded with the 16-round shorty mags for "close encounters" when off-duty. With the MAC suppressor, the M-10 was very efficient at room-clearing and tunnel clearing, but "outside of ten feet, you want the Swedish K."
Giant can on the muzzle giving you something to grip probably helps a little. Obviously it'd get hot under sustained fire but that's not really that kinda mission.
I'd go with the Sten. It just reminds me of seeing commandos and british special forces in WW2 with them slung over a shoulder whilst in a boat or doing some other sneaky work, and the suppressed ones are just so cool looking to me. I'll always have a soft spot for the Sten gun. It's a very important part of british history.
Of the two guns on the table, the STEN gives a "hostilities only" recruit the best chance of not killing his own mates. As Mr Keane says: it's controllable. When the Ingram (not sure which exact model) featured in a John Wayne film, its selling point was that the silencer made it more controllable. But anyone firing a silenced gun that had to be held with one hand on the silencer, for as many rounds as John Wayne did in the film, would be able to smell his supporting hand cooking.
I don't know how many rounds you're talking about, but there's a reason that the MAC suppressor had both a large expansion chamber before the baffled portion, and a heavy nomex heat-resistant jacket to cover the sheet-metal can! If memory serves, that heat-resistant jacket then had a neoprene outer layer, and I don't remember what the third layer was (asbestos, like barrel-changing gloves?); but it had three layers. The muzzle wipes were only good for 200 rounds, and I recall the heat shielding jacket as being comfortably warm after two fairly rapid magazines.
@@davidgoodnow269 I have a pair of gloves for handling hot things which are made of woven kevlar. Great for hot stuff, but I tried using them to pick up a hedgehog once! That didn't work so well: the spikes go through between the weave. Asbestos is all too possible for the silencer jacket, though. The need must have been pretty obvious. You sometimes see lace-up covers for machine-gun barrels, perhaps to hide the heat rather than handle things. With the advent of the thermal-imaging camera, we might yet see a modern Lewis gun with forced air cooling!
@matthewspencer972 I don't see being able to hide a firing, or recently fired, weapon from thermal detection. But -- not forced-air cooling (though extremely helpful and effective for an automatic rifle that has a free-float carbon fiber wrapped barrel for stiffness and dissappation inside a full-length aluminum or carbon fiber tubular handguard, as often done with AR-pattern rifles these days, that could be extremely good in high-intensity situations) -- but *water-cooling* would work in high-heat backgrounds. The old water-cooled machine guns don't get much above 30°F beyond ambient, as long as enough water cans are piped together. There is a down-side of the water not cooling very quickly, so they'll continue to illuminate the near-area with heat dissappation, potentially for hours. That was part of the charm: you fight, and take turns fixing a cup of tea or coffee. I do like your Lewis gun idea, with the application I described. It might be a third leg to prevent barrel warping from overheating (a lá G36, Afghanistan -- or any other rifle, ever), as well as reducing cooling time before an exfiltration sneak were that necessary. But for desert heat or croplands in summer, I do like a water-cooled!
@@davidgoodnow269 A lot of Royal Navy people preferred the .5" Vickers gun over the Browning .50" because the water-cooled Vickers weighed not much more than the air-cooled version of the Browning and, between the water cooling and a less hot cartridge, went on firing for longer. So, the ideal *gun* for MTB and MGBs carrying out raids on the Dutch coast, because once the Luftwaffe knew they were there, they'd have to fight off air attacks all the way home to Lowerstoft. The gripe with the .5" Vickers was mainly the *mountings:* a hand-cranked 4-gun mounting for full-sized warships (intended to put a wall of lead ahead of a biplane torpedo bomber rather than to track a monoplane fighter) and a hydraulic twin mount for fast boats, where there was not enough structure to protect the hydraulic lines. Robert Hitchens designed his own, manually-operated twin gun mount and fitted it to all his 70&3/4' boats and this seemed to work for him. The other advantage was that the .5" Vickers had pretty much the same trajectory as the .303" so anyone who had a bit of practice with the .303" could hit things with the .5" more or less from the start. There is no point firing anything from a fast boat on the North Sea at anything that is more than 300 yards away. An enemy boat could hide behind the waves as close as 140 yards.
I've had a soft spot for the MAC-10 ever since I saw the Miami Vice episode "Evan". Dual-wielded MAC-10s obliterating futuristic mannequins, accompanied by Peter Gabriel's "The Rhythm of the Heat", was pure epicness.
Sten, absolutely. If you’ve ever shot either of these guns, you can shoot the Sten controllably… not the Mac10. You can also lay prone with it way easier.
My grandfather passed last year on Aug 16th - he had just gotten his Mac 10 out of NFA jail a couple months before. Luckily, we got to play with it a bit. My grandmother always thought his affinity for guns was a joke and waste of money.... He got his Mac 10 for $13k - with the suppressor and 20 magazines... that was the price AFTER the tax stamps were paid. I'd say he made a great investment. Now my grandmother gets to reap that benefit and all the other classic guns he collected over the years.
Now that I own an original MAC M10, I genuinely have no clue why people give it so much hate. If you put even a handful of magazines through it and actually try to hit things, you can get good with it real quick, and your groups tighten significantly. If your impression of the gun is you rented it once at a range and put 30 rounds through it, I can understand why you hate it. That doesn't change what the gun is capable of though. It really isn't the "phone booth" gun people say it is, and I'm pretty sure it's because people parrot that line without shooting the gun, or don't actually have more than a smidgen of experience with it.
It's always a pleasure to sit down and talk to John, he is a wealth of knowledge, and a very down to earth guy. I've had the pleasure to get to visit with him, at ofasts for the last few years.
“the Sten is the absolute floor of functional SMG”, this is pretty much the whole design philosophy of the Sten, they wanted the cheapest cost and fastest production possible while still having an acceptable weapon
I think it all depends on the combat situation: One or very few enemies at some distance outside - Sten. An unknown number of enemy targets to hose down in confined spaces - M10 (with a can, so that the user still has some hearing left afterwards). For recreational shooting probably the Sten as well, as neither concealalabilty nor a very high ROF is much of a factor there, while the ammo cost and the controllability may be.
Being a “poor” NFA enthusiast, I own both a MAC10/45 and a STEN Mk.II. If I HAD to choose one, in OEM factory configuration, it would be the STEN. The MAC10 (IMHO) is just dangerously uncontrollable. From the high ROF, lack of suitable foregrip and less than useless wire stock, it is a danger to just about everyone and everything in front of, or behind the trigger other than maybe the intended target. Fortunately, Lage changed all that and transformed the MAC into a very usable SMG. The STEN, as is, is at least controllable and with vetted magazines, sufficiently reliable. I have thousands of trouble-free rounds through mine. Ergonomically, I am amazed it was able to be wielded as effectively as it was in combat during WWII. Southpaws need not apply. So, MAC w/Lage upper > STEN > factory MAC. Also, great seeing you at SAR-West, last week. I am a fan of the channel 😃
Sten is a crap gun but its been proven to work properly during WW2, my grandpa used one from a parachute drop for years. Took over a Gestapo HQ near Tarnow, and a train station near Brzostek and did numerous other takeovers in the 1940-45 years. The sten you can actually aim and shoot someone from a medium-ish distance, you can lay supresive fire if you have a couple people equiped with it. The MAC is more of a spray and pray out of a car window typa gun
The Sten Still props up in conflicts around the world. In India many insurgents still use one, given how many were supplied to South And Southeast Asia during WW2 and later.
The Sten is not crap! It is BASIC! It does only the bare minimum, but it DOES do it, and often that's all you need! A "crap" gun is one that DOESN'T do the bare minimum, that does NOT fulfill your immediate needs, and the Sten is not that! The Sten is reasonably reliable, durable, and the sights and accuracy are more than enough to do it's job! Any better would have been a waste of money, resources, and time!
After Dunkirk, the need was CHEAP & QUICK! Fortunately it also functioned fairly well, as the saying goes "good enough for govt. work"... a double-feed mag woulda been nice, but will it work with battlefield pickup MP-40 mags? 9 mil ammo could be scrounged from your enemies, as well....its the next best buzz-gun if ya can't get a Sterling!
@@svenblubber5448 See, I'm not sure this is true, for instance would a metal foregrip to give the gun something vaguely resembling ergonomics really have increased the price enough to make it unviable?
Of the few full auto's I've had the luxury to shoot, the Sten was actually one of my favorites. Hated the Thompson because the stock angle made it seem like it wasnt developed with humans in mind, the MP40 seemed ok but the one I was shooting at the time had a tendency to malfunction and to randomly go run away full auto. The Sten while crude was shockingly pleasant.
John is totally correct about Lage and Ian heading up the product design and marketing efforts. I would love to pick up a MAC and then throw the Lage book at it.
Amen brothers. You are spot on here. With a suppressor both do become a lot better. On semi auto a MAC is actually pretty accurate. On full auto they are a hand held claymore mine. Cut a Sten barrel back to about 3/4 inch past the barrel shroud, thread it 5/8 x 24, direct thread a good suppressor on with a reproduction WWII heat wrap and feed it some 147 grain sub sonic and then you have something really good I would take that into a fire fight if I had to. . Part of the Sten reliability problem is a lot of poor quality magazines otherwise it is a pretty good SMG. Besides what do you want for one pound, eighteen shillings six pence.
When Germany was desperate for weapons in the latter stages of WWII they started building Sten copies which shows the basic soundness of the design for a fighting weapon.
I’ve fired both of these, and I would make the same choices. The Sten is surprisingly comfortable to fire. The superior stock helps here. The lower rate of fire lends itself to superior accuracy. The sights are easy to pick up and decent out to 50 yards or so. It did its job as a cheap, easy to manufacture sub gun for a wartime economy. The MAC was like a buzz saw with crappy sights and really hard to control its climb. Its stock is also really awful.
I think it depends on what you want to use it for. Are you going to war? Sten. Better ergonomics, slower rate of fire, less recoil allowing for more shots on target and sustainable engagements. Are you a gangster in the 80s Miamy? Ingram. Concealable, high fire rate. Easy to swisscheese somebody from up close or do a ride by. Can be shot one handed from a motorcycle when the target stops at the traffic lights. Going on a range? Probably ingram, its more fun to shoot and easier to store.
I’m glad he pointed out that it is a MAC 10 in 9mm. There are lots of youngsters who don’t know it existed. There was a MAC 10 in .45 and 9mm. The MAC 11 was originally a .380 machine pistol, and much smaller. Later on there were M11-9mm produced. I’m also amazed that there are youngsters who say that they have shot certain guns, when in fact they only shot them in a video game!🤣
So true over the years, I got to shoot a few submachine guns and have shot close to a dozen or so machine guns. Many people have tried to tell me about some of them that haven't actually seen them in person, let alone carried or shot them.
The answer is very simple. You can take the MAC M10 or M11 over the STEN Mk.II if it comes with its original silencer. If the MAC comes with the LAGE Mfg. upper (possibly with the full improvement package, including the closed-bolt slow-fire convention), you can _still_ take the MAC over many PDWs out there, including several modern manufacture models.
Comment before watching the video: As someone who has had the chance to shoot both a STEN and a MAC, this is like asking "Would you rather have a 1980s Ford Escort with a 3-speed slushbox or a bicycle with no seat." The STEN is extremely basic and not fast, but will actually work and get you from A to B. The MAC? It gives the illusion of transportation, but you would really rather stay home than try to use it as such. About as close to a "Cake or Death" question as you can get IMHO. The only saving grace of the MAC is that you can get different upper receivers that actually transform it into something useful.
The Sten (the entire series) was designed for an entirely different role than the Ingram M-10 series. > The Sten was for Frontline (and Spec Ops) use. Slower Rate of Fire allows you to carry fewer magazines and still have suppressive capabilities,. > The M-10 was "A Room Broom" designed to empty the magazine quickly as you literally sprayed a room that only had Hostiles and no "Friendlies" or Hostages to worry about...
I never shot the Ingram, but based on my father's time with it, and the few times I shot it, the Sten, as crappy and rattle-prone as it was, had OK accuracy at range, and permitted decent trigger control. The Ingram, from all of the comments and reports I went over, was basically a room-broom and nothing more.
Sterling smg over a Sten any day. The biggest flaw of the sten IMO was those mags. The mags were so unreliable, but the sten is a solid shooter. The Mac is a sub gun knife fighter.
That was the whole point of the Sterling. The Sten magazine suffered from wartime material quality with variable spring quality and sheet steel quality but it was supposed to be checked in practice and iffy magazines returned to store and a replacement issued. Also the lips were not squaddie proof. Even with the Sterling I have seen soldiers use them to open bottles….. Still the better gun even so once you have checked the magazines. Good Sten magazines well looked after are reliable. Be fair, the youngest real ones are 70 plus years old.
@@johnfisk811, I had my MAC10 9mm gunsmithed by Craig Wheatley 25years ago and it feeds 100% with all but 1 magazine which I swapped out the spring with a Wolfe modern spring and that's 100% now too.
Absolutely! With some practice a man with a Sten could do a pretty efficient job of things, but the MAC 10 is a bit of an unwieldy bugger and I found much harder to make hits without wasting a lot of ammo.
I take your Mr Plissken and raise him by a hundreds of Resistance fighters all over the Nazi occupied Europe. Snake is cool, but all those people I've mentioned are way more cooler. Bronisław "Lot" Pietrasiewicz was using a Sten, with a good effect, during the assassination of Franz Kutschera, chief of SS and police for Nazi occupied Warsaw.
@@peterkerr4019 "McQ" was the second time, after Ecsape from NY, I have seen Ingram being used. But just like Snake he is using Ingram with a silencer.
5:47 Sten, obviously. it has proved itself as a capable combat weapon well into the late 50's, in some parts even longer then that. the SAS and MACV-SOG used them even in the korean and vietnam wars
I love my sten mk3 it’s my pride lol the first gun I built from a parts kit that I had to actually build. It’s not like building an AR or you just piece it together like Legos experience to actually hear. Fire was another fun experience.
MAC 10/11 < Sten MKII or MKV (ideally with Austen loader) < MAC with/Lage upper (preferably with Shockwave magazines). I prioritized based on suitably across multiple distances, reliability, accuracy, maintainability, and controllability in FA.
...Every time I see a MAC 10, I always get reminded of that one scene in True Lies where Jamie Lee Curtis drops it down a set of stairs and it drop fires and kills all the enemies in the room... XD
As an experienced covert operator i.e. I've played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare a couple of times, the one circumstance where you'd choose a MAC10 over a Sten is when you'd want somthing concealable. Other than that, yep, Sten all the way. And I do like the fact it has a bayonet, "They don't like it up 'em Captain Mainwaring!" Talking of which, and I suspect I've posted this elsewhere before, when the Home Guard was issued with Stens one veteran commented, "We're going to win this thing; we've finally ditched this fine British craftmanship nonsense!"
The M-10 doesn't have the STEN's excuse of being designed/built with the requirements of 1. We need guns. Lots and Lots of guns. 2. We need those guns NOW. 3. Turns out SMGs are useful and desirable for infantry sections, so we need enough to equip each Rifle section with 2 or 3. Now. And make more for La Resistance. And while you're at it, make even more. NOW.
Logically I’d pick the Sten. Way more controllable and probably easier to keep running, being so simple you can make one in your garage. But for cool factor , especially being an ‘80s kid, I gotta go with the MAC. MACs were in so many movies when I was growing up and they are just friggin cool.
funny thought when I took my STEN to the range for the first time, they put me on the rifle range, and I just asked WHY? they said it was long enough to pass as a rifle carbine! I just removed the stock and sling fired 300 rounds hitting every target without malfunction, needless to say since then the STEN was approved, all I did was put on the wooden para grip and viola a STEN sub-gun!
Lage aside, the Mac and Sten are both rapidly becoming the two most printed-for parts kit build guns. They're extremely comparable price wise and it's become "normal" to put ar15 fire controls behind/beneath them, thus legally making them from a machine gun into semi-auto.
"X vs mk2 STEN" is more a question of "does the extra cost of X worth it" Would you choose a Thompson over a Sten? I take the Sten because the added quality of the Thompson is not worth the cost.
That question always reminds me of the New Jersey shop teacher who was busted by the BATF for using the Browning 1919 and M2 machine guns as class projects in metal shop, they made five .30's and two .50's, if memory serves.
Both are cool. But Sten is my preferred. Slower cyclic control rate of fire makes the gun easier to handle and conserve ammo better. Shoulder fired is always more accurate.
Id say sten for longer barrel, actual place to grab with non trigger hand, rate of fire, better stock, i like the sights better, hmmmm.. thats all i can think of
I’d always opt for the MAC. Adding the Lage Manufacturing Rifle upper to it makes it an incredible option for a legal Class3 rifle while still having the additional option to make it a tiny PDW as well. Then if you can get the version that fires from the briefcase, just WOW!
As the owner of a BXP, which is a Mac10/9 clone internally while externally looks like an Uzi, I agree with the weight issue and in original form almost impossible to aim. However after installing a red dot it works well enough for 3-gun competitions
Whoa! I thought that was some sort of cleaning kit attachment I hadn't ever seen before. I didn't realize that the bayonet actually could fit in the stock. That is really cool. I managed to picked one up back when Apex released them almost 10 years ago.
I think it depends on if you want to imagine yourself either dropping into WWII Europe to fight Nazis behind enemy lines or gunning down rival drug dealers in 1979 Miami.
Honestly, for me, it would depend. For almost anything, I would choose the Sten. But if I was doing something sneaky and was looking for something to use as a last resort, the MAC has some compelling points. If I get discovered, I could pull it out, spray it at the people bothering me, then use the chaos to run away.
The whole combat scenario changes everything with firearms. Some of the most fun range guns aren't reliable at all. Hell some of my favorite range toys aren't even good firearms. They're just super cool and fun to fire. Now going into combat I want the most reliable firearm and most importantly something I'm familiar with.
I definitely would choose the Sten over M10 if going to combat that was my choice before the video. As a recreational one, the MAC would have been my choice. The part of the conversion option took out would shut down that choice for me. As a Gen X, the MAC is iconic. Now, a wildcard to choose between would be an MK11 STEN and M3a1. The latter would be my first choice. The cost of ammunition would be the downside, 9mm being a lower cost along with parts and magazines.
I have a transferable Sten tube gun and a transferable reising aswell as a post sample M16 and Full auto Glock, and equally have had an Uzi, MPI69 and Thompson. All that to say, I may be psychotic but I think I genuinely like my sten above all the rest as far as shooting goes, my only complaint is loading the mags and the weight of the gun. Mine runs like a top once I found a good grouping of mags.
I'll go for the Sten. Even thought it has a stock the stock can give me something to shoulder on when shooting, longer barrel so I can hit maybe up to 100 yards and the sight. We can also crank out some DIY pistol grip for it and do some sort of DYI makeshift to improve the stock.
The one advantage of the Mac is the location of the magazine. Any sub that loads magazine in grip is faster and more foolproof to reload, under stress, due to proprioception.
It was never "Would you choose a Thompson over a Sten?" It was "would you choose a sharpened broom handle over the Sten?" The Sten was born in post-Dunkirk Britain and has a special place in history.
If you're at war, having A Gun is better than no gun
I would easily choose the Sten over the Liberator and Liberator-adjacent 'resistance guns' that were developed, and the volkssturm rifles.
Thompson is a bad gun
The Sten is crudly made - but pretty well thought-out.
It's controlable due to it's low rate of fire - and the stock gets a lot better if you wrap it with something.
The Mac-10 (as it is) is very consealable. You can wear it with a sling under your jacket. Naturally - a submachinegun this small (in 9mm) is a lot harder to control. Today, guns like the (smaller caliber) P90 or MP9 are available - decades after the Mac-10 came to be.
The Sten is not consealable - but it was never supposed to be. It's a military firearm.
And - as you said - it wasn't made to be pretty or fancy. Britain was in dire need of a mass-produceable submachinegun at the time - and the Sten was the best solution available.
The question should be when equipping an army would you rather have 100,000 Thompson/Suomi/Berettas or 4 million sten guns?
“the sten is the absolute floor of functional SMG” is the nicest thing someone has said about the sten
@@alexdemoya2119 but the question is, which you rather have a sten or nothing?
I have experience with sten mk2 and m11/9mm. I concede that they are pretty crude. The M11/9mm I have shot the most has so far had about 1 malfunction in 1000 rounds. To me the point is the unfair "law" that makes the better machine guns financially way out of reach. It is just a little bit snobbish to make fun of the lessor sub guns. Really, who can afford $10,000, $20,000, $$40,000+ for a fully automatic gun of any kind.
@@chrisstephens6673 Well in danish: "Sten" means a stone...so-eh?
@dallesamllhals9161 You can always throw a stone, so that might work!
Look up Michael Cain's (yes the actor) view on the STEN. He carried one as infantry soldier in the Korean War.
I shot a sten full auto and was pleased with the slow cycling and shots on target. It was nostalgic, but that aside it was easy to control.
If they were well looked after (especially the mag lips) and kept clean they were efficient and cheap killers of axis troops! As people were continually told at the time "There's a war on!"
You've probably shot more full auto than the troops that actually carried it in the field.
A platoon can only so much ammo, most of that is for the machine guns, and resupply is a "probably, maybe" depending on circumstances. Fire discipline is a real thing.
@@andyleighton6969highly unlikely that he single-handedly fired full auto more than all soldiers who were ever armed with a sten
The specimens I saw which were found in the wild vary greatly in reliability and rate of fire between 350 and over 600 rpm.
"The Ingram M-10 is the perfect weapon for a fire fight in a phone booth", was the phrase I'd heard decades ago. Having spent some time with a 45 cal M-10 a long time ago I would choose the Ingram. But, only if it had the Sionics Suppressor on it. With Werbell's "Can" in place, it made the M-10 much more controllable, it the wire stock was extended. Without the "Can" and the stock in place when firing, it was just a "Bullet-hose".
Its literally a Can. If you dont have it, its a Can't.
I own an OG MPA10T Mac clone and shoots slightly better than people make it out to be, but not by some crazy amount. The sights are literally a crappy peep hole and a bent sheet metal front post. It’ll still be fist sized accurate up to 25 yards in semi auto though.
It’s just really concealable and cool looking so I love it. Plus US machine gun has good aftermarket support for them.
I remember seeing that setup in the apartment scene in Scarface.
I've shot the MAC-10, but not with the can. It's not very controllable, but it's compact size sure is nice.
Recall seeing a “brick” like the one in front of Ian about 1987 in a gun store, and the proprietor spoke of it as a “disposable” piece…
"At least its not a mk2 STEN" is a perfect marketing phrase for absolute better than bare minimum.
Sten mk2 was better than the stamped mk3, couldn't replace parts on the mk 3
..so...the Sterling ain't a Sten-kid?
@dallesamllhals9161 Sterling? don't you mean the E-11 blaster?
The irony is the Sten is harder to manufacture than a Mac 11 in all aspects lmao.
@@TheMhalpern A-hole 😛
Good morning from south central BC, thanks for the video. One of my handgun shooting mentors was a Canadian Army vet Ernie who ended up in a wheelchair as a result of action in Italy pushing the German army out. One day between silhouette rounds I asked what he was issued for that task and he initially answered a Sten that as Ernie put it, "Sometimes wouldn't shut off". He further described the fighting as "not house to house, but room to room" often. Then after a short pause said to me, "Nothing beat grenades for that and we had a lot of them!". Thanks for the memories from long ago, of great folks who are now gone on before us.
@bc30cal99;
My dad was there, too, Sicily first, then up the East coast of Italy...he was a combat engineer, so more "boom" and build, than "tatta-tatta", but picked up an oak leaf during a German mortar attack. Thanks for your memories.
Meanwhile, modern warfare has given people the opposite opinion of grenades. Earl Plumlee said that his grenade fight started when he threw one at the enemy and all it did was remind them that they had grenades too. For every one he threw, half a dozen came back.
I was told the exact same things from my grandad who worked with world war 2 vets in the 1950's-60s and the WW2 vets who were his superiors when he was in Germany as occupational forces in the early-mid 50's.
The reason it wouldn't "shut off" is because when dropped, the breech bold would bounce back just enough to grab and chamber a round but not catch the sear.
Seems like the Canadian-made STENs were exceptionally poor
The only Bri'ish smg I love is the Sterling because of Star Wars
I’m sure you’re aware, but of course, the point of the sten is not that it’s a great submachinegun. It’s that it’s a submachine gun that works most of the time and you can have them right now, and the Germans might be invading in a few weeks.
Cost and availability in a war situation quite rightly outweighs super quality. As the marketing people say, stack 'em high and sell 'em cheap!
@@chrisstephens6673
And ship em out to SOE's overseas customers as fast as you can! 😁🤣
SMG equivalent of doing your homework on the bus on the way to school
I think the Sten does get unfairly maligned sometimes because a lot of people today tend to look at it from a peacetime perspective, whereas when you put it into the wartime context of the time, with a country that's basically the last one standing and has its back against a wall, a gun that works and is available the moment you need it (And which you can produce in the millions even without the USA's absurd industrial capacity) is arguably perfect no matter how basic it is. But that said, it's not wrong to call it the absolute floor of what an SMG should be. This is far more damning of the M10 which has none of the above excuses, was made 20 years later, and still somehow manages to almost be worse 🤣
@@Quintus_Fontane Relavant is that it DOES the bare minimum, many guns fail at even doing that!
One comparison I alwasy use is that one MP5 is better than one Sten, but 10 Stens are better than one MP5!
Also, a basic gun today is a better weapon than the promise of having a better gun tomorrow!
My grandfather used both the 1928A1 Thompson and the MkII STEN in France. He was trained on both because during Basic in Canada he was trained on the STEN, and the Thompson because he was a Sherman Firefly driver and his tank came equipped with one. He always said he preferred the Thompson (who wouldn't? 😁) but the STEN had its good points too. The STEN was much lighter than the Thompson, and cost much, much less so there were a heck of a lot more of them available to Canadian troops.
Well of course HE would have preferred the Thompson. He didn't have to carry it (and its ammo) around all day...Its a heavy bastard!
@@trooperdgb9722 That is true....but he was a BIG farm boy from the Canadian Prairies so the weight wasn't quite the problem as it was for most soldiers....
It was a case of 300plus dollars for a Thompson against 10 or 12 dollars for a sten with 5 hours production time.
That’s the thing. In the case of your grandfather it wasn’t a choice between having a Thompson or a Sten.
It was probably choice between having a Webley revolver or a Sten.
@@hastekulvaati9681 IIRC he was issued an Enfield revolver and the Thompson was in the tank for defense against infantry. I'm not sure (and he's long gone now) just how or why he acquired the STEN he had. He probably got it from a wounded infantryman....
The Sten is obviously the superior choice because you can unironically shout "Bring up the PIAT" while holding it. Q.E.D.
As an ex British Soldier I can honestly say that a lot of people would be surprised at the single shot accuracy and range of the Sten up to 200 yds , even the full auto is usable up to 100 yds .
I'd be very surprised if you were old enough to have shot the Sten in the British Army. You might be thinking of the Stirling which replaced the Sten from the 50s to the 60s, and remained in service until the 90s. It has a similar layout, but much better construction.
@@creanero i can remember talking to an old chap who was called up in the latter stages of the war , and his feelings on the sten was that no two shot the same , but if you spent time with the one you were given and got to know where it shot , he claimed in single shot he was good enough to head shoot rabbits up to about 40 yards with it ,
Sterling? Yes. Regularly shot it at Bisley in RASAM to 100m, many years ago. Some firers (Gurkhas, for the most part...) were getting amazing groups with theirs.
@@creanerosterling. Or SMG as it was know.
@@creanero Still some Stens in armouries, or there were until the 1980s.
The design of the Sten was brilliant for its circumstances. With limited supplies, limited number of good tooling and high demand its a perfect match. Its easy to dismiss it from a modern standpoint or even a contemporary american standpoint, but for a production in whats essentially a warzone with submarines patrolling the seas and bombers flying it's brilliant. Does not need a lot of tooling, can be made by uneducated workers, uses less material and readily available ones and can be made in high numbers quickly. And is still perfectly usable and battle effective.
The getmans tried very complicated designs that where objectively better, but they couldn't match the output or keep production up under worsening wartime conditions.
sten for actual close combat, mac10 for 80s action movies.
If we're at point blank range I'd take the MAC.
The absolute floor of a functional sub machine gun. One of the few times an army got exactly what it asked for.
"We want angry toob."
"Here is angry toob."
I'm glad us Aussies finally chose the Owen.
"I like your simple and affordable design but can it be made simpler?" Asked the Military.
"Of course" said the UK's hastily asembled arms industry, "how many do you want?"
The Sten was directly descended from the German MP18 II…
The STEN, a crossbreeding of a German SMG, The Lancaster and the most important of all things, British shed technology
@ The Lanchester was a clone of the German MP28 I… (with bronze fittings)…
The Germans however cloned the Sten too…
"This...or a Sten" could be a fun series 🙂
The surprising thing would be how few SMGs can actually win that competition. Sure, some would, but a lot that got adopted would not.
In defense of the Ingram I'd mention that I'd much rather have that as a truck driver, armor crew, etc. Its much more compact and it does the job needed, which is spraying bullets at the bad stuff as you run the other way looking for cover. Which for a lot of people thats what "combat" is, they arn't some door kicking specops guy. They are a truck driver that got ambushed and need something small that can spray to hopefully get somewhere safe.
Short mag folding sterling then.
The funny part of that is, the Ingram M-10 was literally _for_ the door-kicking spec ops guy!
Let's say I knew a guy who knew guys, and leave it at that. One wore two Ingram M-11 .380s under his armpits, hanging where he could reach up and swivel forwards, with tie-downs holding the muzzles to his belt and loaded with the 16-round shorty mags for "close encounters" when off-duty.
With the MAC suppressor, the M-10 was very efficient at room-clearing and tunnel clearing, but "outside of ten feet, you want the Swedish K."
SEALS used them in Vietnam - with 'noise-reducer'.
Having worked with a MAC 11, as soon as I saw the title of the video I said, "oh, I'll take the Sten!"
what kind of job gets you to work with a mac 10 beside being a terrorist on dust 2
Reading the comments, that seems to be the universal opinion.
On historical grounds alone, the Mk II Sten. Can't help it, I see an Ingram and see a Saturday night in the 'hood.
You may not like it, but Snake Plisskin's Mac 10 is what peak submachinegun performance looks like.
Giant can on the muzzle giving you something to grip probably helps a little. Obviously it'd get hot under sustained fire but that's not really that kinda mission.
Snake Plisskin is the coolest movie name ever
I thought he was dead?
I'd go with the Sten. It just reminds me of seeing commandos and british special forces in WW2 with them slung over a shoulder whilst in a boat or doing some other sneaky work, and the suppressed ones are just so cool looking to me. I'll always have a soft spot for the Sten gun. It's a very important part of british history.
Of the two guns on the table, the STEN gives a "hostilities only" recruit the best chance of not killing his own mates. As Mr Keane says: it's controllable.
When the Ingram (not sure which exact model) featured in a John Wayne film, its selling point was that the silencer made it more controllable.
But anyone firing a silenced gun that had to be held with one hand on the silencer, for as many rounds as John Wayne did in the film, would be able to smell his supporting hand cooking.
McQ
I don't know how many rounds you're talking about, but there's a reason that the MAC suppressor had both a large expansion chamber before the baffled portion, and a heavy nomex heat-resistant jacket to cover the sheet-metal can! If memory serves, that heat-resistant jacket then had a neoprene outer layer, and I don't remember what the third layer was (asbestos, like barrel-changing gloves?); but it had three layers. The muzzle wipes were only good for 200 rounds, and I recall the heat shielding jacket as being comfortably warm after two fairly rapid magazines.
@@davidgoodnow269 I have a pair of gloves for handling hot things which are made of woven kevlar. Great for hot stuff, but I tried using them to pick up a hedgehog once! That didn't work so well: the spikes go through between the weave. Asbestos is all too possible for the silencer jacket, though. The need must have been pretty obvious. You sometimes see lace-up covers for machine-gun barrels, perhaps to hide the heat rather than handle things. With the advent of the thermal-imaging camera, we might yet see a modern Lewis gun with forced air cooling!
@matthewspencer972 I don't see being able to hide a firing, or recently fired, weapon from thermal detection. But -- not forced-air cooling (though extremely helpful and effective for an automatic rifle that has a free-float carbon fiber wrapped barrel for stiffness and dissappation inside a full-length aluminum or carbon fiber tubular handguard, as often done with AR-pattern rifles these days, that could be extremely good in high-intensity situations) -- but *water-cooling* would work in high-heat backgrounds. The old water-cooled machine guns don't get much above 30°F beyond ambient, as long as enough water cans are piped together. There is a down-side of the water not cooling very quickly, so they'll continue to illuminate the near-area with heat dissappation, potentially for hours. That was part of the charm: you fight, and take turns fixing a cup of tea or coffee.
I do like your Lewis gun idea, with the application I described. It might be a third leg to prevent barrel warping from overheating (a lá G36, Afghanistan -- or any other rifle, ever), as well as reducing cooling time before an exfiltration sneak were that necessary. But for desert heat or croplands in summer, I do like a water-cooled!
@@davidgoodnow269 A lot of Royal Navy people preferred the .5" Vickers gun over the Browning .50" because the water-cooled Vickers weighed not much more than the air-cooled version of the Browning and, between the water cooling and a less hot cartridge, went on firing for longer. So, the ideal *gun* for MTB and MGBs carrying out raids on the Dutch coast, because once the Luftwaffe knew they were there, they'd have to fight off air attacks all the way home to Lowerstoft.
The gripe with the .5" Vickers was mainly the *mountings:* a hand-cranked 4-gun mounting for full-sized warships (intended to put a wall of lead ahead of a biplane torpedo bomber rather than to track a monoplane fighter) and a hydraulic twin mount for fast boats, where there was not enough structure to protect the hydraulic lines. Robert Hitchens designed his own, manually-operated twin gun mount and fitted it to all his 70&3/4' boats and this seemed to work for him.
The other advantage was that the .5" Vickers had pretty much the same trajectory as the .303" so anyone who had a bit of practice with the .303" could hit things with the .5" more or less from the start. There is no point firing anything from a fast boat on the North Sea at anything that is more than 300 yards away. An enemy boat could hide behind the waves as close as 140 yards.
I've had a soft spot for the MAC-10 ever since I saw the Miami Vice episode "Evan". Dual-wielded MAC-10s obliterating futuristic mannequins, accompanied by Peter Gabriel's "The Rhythm of the Heat", was pure epicness.
Sten, absolutely. If you’ve ever shot either of these guns, you can shoot the Sten controllably… not the Mac10. You can also lay prone with it way easier.
Use it to anchor your canoe eh? Now I understand why so many are lost in boating accidents...
This was NOT a boating accident!!
My grandfather passed last year on Aug 16th - he had just gotten his Mac 10 out of NFA jail a couple months before. Luckily, we got to play with it a bit.
My grandmother always thought his affinity for guns was a joke and waste of money.... He got his Mac 10 for $13k - with the suppressor and 20 magazines... that was the price AFTER the tax stamps were paid. I'd say he made a great investment. Now my grandmother gets to reap that benefit and all the other classic guns he collected over the years.
MAC-10 also saw some use by British SAS.
Now that I own an original MAC M10, I genuinely have no clue why people give it so much hate. If you put even a handful of magazines through it and actually try to hit things, you can get good with it real quick, and your groups tighten significantly. If your impression of the gun is you rented it once at a range and put 30 rounds through it, I can understand why you hate it. That doesn't change what the gun is capable of though. It really isn't the "phone booth" gun people say it is, and I'm pretty sure it's because people parrot that line without shooting the gun, or don't actually have more than a smidgen of experience with it.
Fun fact : in 1950's Finnish army replaced Suomis with Stens
It's a really interesting story, also involving Carcanos, the kp/44 SMG, and Sam Cummings.
@@ForgottenWeaponsInteresting enough for a future video perhaps?
Definitely - I cover it in my kp/44 video here: ua-cam.com/video/7EFFCoqCWmI/v-deo.html
Israel used a bunch of Stens early on too.
Soviets replaced PPShs with PPSs.
It's always a pleasure to sit down and talk to John, he is a wealth of knowledge, and a very down to earth guy. I've had the pleasure to get to visit with him, at ofasts for the last few years.
“the Sten is the absolute floor of functional SMG”, this is pretty much the whole design philosophy of the Sten, they wanted the cheapest cost and fastest production possible while still having an acceptable weapon
Exactly! For this reason I found the discussion little more than a gun nerd indulgence.
Owen it’s not expensive and still much better than the sten.
I think it all depends on the combat situation:
One or very few enemies at some distance outside - Sten.
An unknown number of enemy targets to hose down in confined spaces - M10 (with a can, so that the user still has some hearing left afterwards).
For recreational shooting probably the Sten as well, as neither concealalabilty nor a very high ROF is much of a factor there, while the ammo cost and the controllability may be.
Sten Mk2 the "absolute floor of functional SMG".
Sten Mk3, the one redesigned and manufactured by Tri-Ang, enters the chat!
Being a “poor” NFA enthusiast, I own both a MAC10/45 and a STEN Mk.II. If I HAD to choose one, in OEM factory configuration, it would be the STEN. The MAC10 (IMHO) is just dangerously uncontrollable. From the high ROF, lack of suitable foregrip and less than useless wire stock, it is a danger to just about everyone and everything in front of, or behind the trigger other than maybe the intended target. Fortunately, Lage changed all that and transformed the MAC into a very usable SMG. The STEN, as is, is at least controllable and with vetted magazines, sufficiently reliable. I have thousands of trouble-free rounds through mine. Ergonomically, I am amazed it was able to be wielded as effectively as it was in combat during WWII. Southpaws need not apply. So, MAC w/Lage upper > STEN > factory MAC. Also, great seeing you at SAR-West, last week. I am a fan of the channel 😃
Sten is a crap gun but its been proven to work properly during WW2, my grandpa used one from a parachute drop for years. Took over a Gestapo HQ near Tarnow, and a train station near Brzostek and did numerous other takeovers in the 1940-45 years. The sten you can actually aim and shoot someone from a medium-ish distance, you can lay supresive fire if you have a couple people equiped with it. The MAC is more of a spray and pray out of a car window typa gun
The Sten Still props up in conflicts around the world. In India many insurgents still use one, given how many were supplied to South And Southeast Asia during WW2 and later.
The Sten is not crap! It is BASIC! It does only the bare minimum, but it DOES do it, and often that's all you need!
A "crap" gun is one that DOESN'T do the bare minimum, that does NOT fulfill your immediate needs, and the Sten is not that!
The Sten is reasonably reliable, durable, and the sights and accuracy are more than enough to do it's job! Any better would have been a waste of money, resources, and time!
After Dunkirk, the need was CHEAP & QUICK! Fortunately it also functioned fairly well, as the saying goes "good enough for govt. work"... a double-feed mag woulda been nice, but will it work with battlefield pickup MP-40 mags? 9 mil ammo could be scrounged from your enemies, as well....its the next best buzz-gun if ya can't get a Sterling!
@@svenblubber5448 See, I'm not sure this is true, for instance would a metal foregrip to give the gun something vaguely resembling ergonomics really have increased the price enough to make it unviable?
Obviously you've never fired either...
I'd LOVE to see Ian do Finish Brutality with a Sten!
Thanks!
Do I want the gun for looking cool? Ingram with a gigantic suppressor.
Do I want the gun as a gun? Sten.
Of the few full auto's I've had the luxury to shoot, the Sten was actually one of my favorites. Hated the Thompson because the stock angle made it seem like it wasnt developed with humans in mind, the MP40 seemed ok but the one I was shooting at the time had a tendency to malfunction and to randomly go run away full auto. The Sten while crude was shockingly pleasant.
John is totally correct about Lage and Ian heading up the product design and marketing efforts. I would love to pick up a MAC and then throw the Lage book at it.
Amen brothers. You are spot on here. With a suppressor both do become a lot better. On semi auto a MAC is actually pretty accurate. On full auto they are a hand held claymore mine. Cut a Sten barrel back to about 3/4 inch past the barrel shroud, thread it 5/8 x 24, direct thread a good suppressor on with a reproduction WWII heat wrap and feed it some 147 grain sub sonic and then you have something really good I would take that into a fire fight if I had to. . Part of the Sten reliability problem is a lot of poor quality magazines otherwise it is a pretty good SMG. Besides what do you want for one pound, eighteen shillings six pence.
When Germany was desperate for weapons in the latter stages of WWII they started building Sten copies which shows the basic soundness of the design for a fighting weapon.
So did the Polish Home Army during occupation (although some of the copies were barely worthy of the name).
I’ve fired both of these, and I would make the same choices. The Sten is surprisingly comfortable to fire. The superior stock helps here. The lower rate of fire lends itself to superior accuracy. The sights are easy to pick up and decent out to 50 yards or so. It did its job as a cheap, easy to manufacture sub gun for a wartime economy. The MAC was like a buzz saw with crappy sights and really hard to control its climb. Its stock is also really awful.
The Sten and The Bren were both iconic back in the day.
@7:12 "There are a lot of considerations when you think about buying a machine gun."
Man what a quote.
A true American! 🦅
I think it depends on what you want to use it for.
Are you going to war? Sten. Better ergonomics, slower rate of fire, less recoil allowing for more shots on target and sustainable engagements.
Are you a gangster in the 80s Miamy? Ingram. Concealable, high fire rate. Easy to swisscheese somebody from up close or do a ride by. Can be shot one handed from a motorcycle when the target stops at the traffic lights.
Going on a range? Probably ingram, its more fun to shoot and easier to store.
"Sten."
"Better ergonomics"
Having shot neither you're probably right but that's not something you'll hear people say often.
@@CeylonMondegreen I mean, yeah, sten and ergonomics should not be mentioned together
I’m glad he pointed out that it is a MAC 10 in 9mm. There are lots of youngsters who don’t know it existed. There was a MAC 10 in .45 and 9mm. The MAC 11 was originally a .380 machine pistol, and much smaller. Later on there were M11-9mm produced.
I’m also amazed that there are youngsters who say that they have shot certain guns, when in fact they only shot them in a video game!🤣
I love it when they say oooh you have a Thompson or m1 garrand or enfield, ive shot those before....here kid hold this....thats heavy...lol
You got that right! And I thought that I was the only guy who met those people!🤣
Maybe they should have a grease gun for the comparison….
Those same people know everything about combat in aircraft, armor and warships.
So true over the years, I got to shoot a few submachine guns and have shot close to a dozen or so machine guns. Many people have tried to tell me about some of them that haven't actually seen them in person, let alone carried or shot them.
Sten has the historical significance… So, I’d go with it.
The answer is very simple.
You can take the MAC M10 or M11 over the STEN Mk.II if it comes with its original silencer.
If the MAC comes with the LAGE Mfg. upper (possibly with the full improvement package, including the closed-bolt slow-fire convention), you can _still_ take the MAC over many PDWs out there, including several modern manufacture models.
Comment before watching the video: As someone who has had the chance to shoot both a STEN and a MAC, this is like asking "Would you rather have a 1980s Ford Escort with a 3-speed slushbox or a bicycle with no seat." The STEN is extremely basic and not fast, but will actually work and get you from A to B. The MAC? It gives the illusion of transportation, but you would really rather stay home than try to use it as such.
About as close to a "Cake or Death" question as you can get IMHO.
The only saving grace of the MAC is that you can get different upper receivers that actually transform it into something useful.
Ugly doesn't mean bad ..the Australian Owen gun is far from pretty but arguably one of the best smg's of ww2
The Sten (the entire series) was designed for an entirely different role than the Ingram M-10 series.
> The Sten was for Frontline (and Spec Ops) use. Slower Rate of Fire allows you to carry fewer magazines and still have suppressive capabilities,.
> The M-10 was "A Room Broom" designed to empty the magazine quickly as you literally sprayed a room that only had Hostiles and no "Friendlies" or Hostages to worry about...
I never shot the Ingram, but based on my father's time with it, and the few times I shot it, the Sten, as crappy and rattle-prone as it was, had OK accuracy at range, and permitted decent trigger control. The Ingram, from all of the comments and reports I went over, was basically a room-broom and nothing more.
Hmm... Brutality match with Sten would be interesting.
With VIS as a sidearm!
Sterling smg over a Sten any day.
The biggest flaw of the sten IMO was those mags. The mags were so unreliable, but the sten is a solid shooter.
The Mac is a sub gun knife fighter.
That was the whole point of the Sterling. The Sten magazine suffered from wartime material quality with variable spring quality and sheet steel quality but it was supposed to be checked in practice and iffy magazines returned to store and a replacement issued. Also the lips were not squaddie proof. Even with the Sterling I have seen soldiers use them to open bottles….. Still the better gun even so once you have checked the magazines. Good Sten magazines well looked after are reliable. Be fair, the youngest real ones are 70 plus years old.
@@johnfisk811, I had my MAC10 9mm gunsmithed by Craig Wheatley 25years ago and it feeds 100% with all but 1 magazine which I swapped out the spring with a Wolfe modern spring and that's 100% now too.
Good description.
“I lost my MAC 10 in a canoeing accident”
I preferred the sten gun
Absolutely! With some practice a man with a Sten could do a pretty efficient job of things, but the MAC 10 is a bit of an unwieldy bugger and I found much harder to make hits without wasting a lot of ammo.
The Sten...
But-but Snake Plissken 🥲
I thought he was .... 😁
Yeah
I take your Mr Plissken and raise him by a hundreds of Resistance fighters all over the Nazi occupied Europe.
Snake is cool, but all those people I've mentioned are way more cooler.
Bronisław "Lot" Pietrasiewicz was using a Sten, with a good effect, during the assassination of Franz Kutschera, chief of SS and police for Nazi occupied Warsaw.
John Wayne never shot no Sten, but he did use a MAC 10 once.
@@peterkerr4019 "McQ" was the second time, after Ecsape from NY, I have seen Ingram being used. But just like Snake he is using Ingram with a silencer.
I'd choose the STEN for the reasons John Keene mentioned along with the Beretta 38A for the same reasons.
5:47 Sten, obviously. it has proved itself as a capable combat weapon well into the late 50's, in some parts even longer then that.
the SAS and MACV-SOG used them even in the korean and vietnam wars
I love my sten mk3 it’s my pride lol the first gun I built from a parts kit that I had to actually build. It’s not like building an AR or you just piece it together like Legos experience to actually hear. Fire was another fun experience.
MAC 10/11 < Sten MKII or MKV (ideally with Austen loader) < MAC with/Lage upper (preferably with Shockwave magazines). I prioritized based on suitably across multiple distances, reliability, accuracy, maintainability, and controllability in FA.
...Every time I see a MAC 10, I always get reminded of that one scene in True Lies where Jamie Lee Curtis drops it down a set of stairs and it drop fires and kills all the enemies in the room... XD
Deus ex Machine Gun.
As an experienced covert operator i.e. I've played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare a couple of times, the one circumstance where you'd choose a MAC10 over a Sten is when you'd want somthing concealable. Other than that, yep, Sten all the way. And I do like the fact it has a bayonet, "They don't like it up 'em Captain Mainwaring!"
Talking of which, and I suspect I've posted this elsewhere before, when the Home Guard was issued with Stens one veteran commented, "We're going to win this thing; we've finally ditched this fine British craftmanship nonsense!"
The M-10 doesn't have the STEN's excuse of being designed/built with the requirements of 1. We need guns. Lots and Lots of guns. 2. We need those guns NOW.
3. Turns out SMGs are useful and desirable for infantry sections, so we need enough to equip each Rifle section with 2 or 3. Now. And make more for La Resistance. And while you're at it, make even more. NOW.
Logically I’d pick the Sten. Way more controllable and probably easier to keep running, being so simple you can make one in your garage. But for cool factor , especially being an ‘80s kid, I gotta go with the MAC. MACs were in so many movies when I was growing up and they are just friggin cool.
Stens are wartime cool. Each one originally cost less than 5 British Pounds, I think.
If it's cheap and does the job, it's not cheap- it's affordable.
Put that on a t-shirt.
As they sit, STEN. Richard made Gordon's MAC frame worth something. If I had a registered Sten tube I'd get a Stirling conversion.
funny thought when I took my STEN to the range for the first time, they put me on the rifle range, and I just asked WHY? they said it was long enough to pass as a rifle carbine! I just removed the stock and sling fired 300 rounds hitting every target without malfunction, needless to say since then the STEN was approved, all I did was put on the wooden para grip and viola a STEN sub-gun!
At least the Sten has some steampunk style. The Mac10 is a metal box that shoots bullets.
Just me, but I'd say the Sten was more Dieselpunk than Steampunk.
@ never heard of Dieselpunk before and you’re right!
Lage aside, the Mac and Sten are both rapidly becoming the two most printed-for parts kit build guns. They're extremely comparable price wise and it's become "normal" to put ar15 fire controls behind/beneath them, thus legally making them from a machine gun into semi-auto.
John's always a good time!
Whichever you pick, you will go down with it. So, if I'm going down, it will be with a cool looking gun and that will be the Sten.
"X vs mk2 STEN" is more a question of "does the extra cost of X worth it" Would you choose a Thompson over a Sten? I take the Sten because the added quality of the Thompson is not worth the cost.
I just like the look of the sten, it’s history and its simplicity; all I need
I love this channel so much, these are so fun 😂
Another context for discussion might be what you'd choose to make for you high school shop class project, a Sten MkII or something else?
That question always reminds me of the New Jersey shop teacher who was busted by the BATF for using the Browning 1919 and M2 machine guns as class projects in metal shop, they made five .30's and two .50's, if memory serves.
"Anchor my canoe." Brilliant in its accuracy.
3:28 the look on Ian’s face… 😂
I've owned both over the years. Love them
Both are cool. But Sten is my preferred. Slower cyclic control rate of fire makes the gun easier to handle and conserve ammo better. Shoulder fired is always more accurate.
Id say sten for longer barrel, actual place to grab with non trigger hand, rate of fire, better stock, i like the sights better, hmmmm.. thats all i can think of
I trained on the Sten while in the reserves. Liked it.
my grandmother made stens in ww2 they were easy to make , they have one of the best history's of any gun
Would love to see more of these vs videos its very entertaining to hear the pros and cons of each weapon
I've seen the original images of the suppressor for the Mac it's like a white salami, massive
I’d always opt for the MAC. Adding the Lage Manufacturing Rifle upper to it makes it an incredible option for a legal Class3 rifle while still having the additional option to make it a tiny PDW as well.
Then if you can get the version that fires from the briefcase, just WOW!
But then it's not really a MAC is it? You've thrown half of it away to fit after market replacements.
Translation: "I'd take the MAC as long as I could replace it with a different gun."
As the owner of a BXP, which is a Mac10/9 clone internally while externally looks like an Uzi, I agree with the weight issue and in original form almost impossible to aim. However after installing a red dot it works well enough for 3-gun competitions
Whoa! I thought that was some sort of cleaning kit attachment I hadn't ever seen before. I didn't realize that the bayonet actually could fit in the stock. That is really cool. I managed to picked one up back when Apex released them almost 10 years ago.
'Would you choose a Zip22 with rifle stock and extended barrel, or a Sten mk II?'
I think it depends on if you want to imagine yourself either dropping into WWII Europe to fight Nazis behind enemy lines or gunning down rival drug dealers in 1979 Miami.
Honestly, for me, it would depend. For almost anything, I would choose the Sten. But if I was doing something sneaky and was looking for something to use as a last resort, the MAC has some compelling points. If I get discovered, I could pull it out, spray it at the people bothering me, then use the chaos to run away.
The whole combat scenario changes everything with firearms. Some of the most fun range guns aren't reliable at all. Hell some of my favorite range toys aren't even good firearms. They're just super cool and fun to fire. Now going into combat I want the most reliable firearm and most importantly something I'm familiar with.
The SBS used the M10
I definitely would choose the Sten over M10 if going to combat that was my choice before the video. As a recreational one, the MAC would have been my choice. The part of the conversion option took out would shut down that choice for me. As a Gen X, the MAC is iconic. Now, a wildcard to choose between would be an MK11 STEN and M3a1. The latter would be my first choice. The cost of ammunition would be the downside, 9mm being a lower cost along with parts and magazines.
Just the coolness factor makes the STEN my pick.
I have a transferable Sten tube gun and a transferable reising aswell as a post sample M16 and Full auto Glock, and equally have had an Uzi, MPI69 and Thompson.
All that to say, I may be psychotic but I think I genuinely like my sten above all the rest as far as shooting goes, my only complaint is loading the mags and the weight of the gun.
Mine runs like a top once I found a good grouping of mags.
I'll go for the Sten. Even thought it has a stock the stock can give me something to shoulder on when shooting, longer barrel so I can hit maybe up to 100 yards and the sight. We can also crank out some DIY pistol grip for it and do some sort of DYI makeshift to improve the stock.
The one advantage of the Mac is the location of the magazine. Any sub that loads magazine in grip is faster and more foolproof to reload, under stress, due to proprioception.
just love the history and look of the sten
I'd pick the Sten Mk2 as well. Worst comes to worst it makes a better club than a M10/9.
But with the MAC 10 you get to pretend you’re an 80s cocaine cowboy