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The Top 5 Firearms in James Bond

Most action heroes borrow their guns from the props department. James Bond's gun is closer to a brand. After more than sixty years, the most recognizable object in the franchise besides the tuxedo is a small German pistol — one Ian Fleming only gave his hero after a firearms enthusiast wrote in to complain about the old one. Here are the five guns that shaped the character.

A franchise built on one pistol

Bond is unusual among long-running action franchises: across decades and actors, one sidearm has stayed attached to the character. That is not an accident of the props department. It is the result of an argument about guns that began in the 1950s, and the five weapons below tell the story of how Bond's armament was chosen, expanded, modernized, and finally brought home again.

#5: The Beretta 418 (the gun Bond was told to give up)

In Fleming's early novels, Bond carried a small Beretta chambered in .25 caliber — a deliberately modest pocket pistol that fit the idea of an intelligence officer who needed to conceal a weapon more than he needed to win a firefight with it. Then a firearms enthusiast named Geoffrey Boothroyd wrote to Fleming and took the choice apart: a .25 was underpowered, he argued, a "lady's gun" for a man in Bond's line of work, and he recommended the Walther PPK instead.

Fleming took the advice to heart. In his 1958 novel Dr. No, M orders Bond to hand over the Beretta and carry a Walther, and the armorer who delivers it is a character named Major Boothroyd — named for the man who wrote the letter. The 1962 film of Dr. No stages the same exchange, and that scene is arguably the single most important moment in the franchise's gun history: it is the moment Bond's signature weapon is chosen.

#4: The AR-7 briefcase rifle

From Russia with Love (1963) gives the franchise its first proper gadget briefing. The armorer, Boothroyd — played by Desmond Llewelyn, the actor who would go on to define Q — hands Bond an attaché case that is a statement of intent for everything Q Branch would become: a folding sniper rifle in the style of the ArmaLite AR-7, along with ammunition, a throwing knife, gold sovereigns, and a booby-trapped tin of tear gas.

The AR-7 is a real rifle, not a movie invention: a .22 LR survival rifle designed so that the barrel and action stow inside a waterproof, floating stock. It is still made today, sold by Henry Repeating Arms as the U.S. Survival AR-7. The film dresses the humble real-world design up as a sniper's tool; the identification lesson is that Bond's most exotic-looking props often start from something you can actually buy.

#3: The Golden Gun

The most famous gun in the franchise that no collector can ever own is Scaramanga's Golden Gun, from The Man with the Golden Gun (1974). Christopher Lee's assassin carries a custom one-shot pistol disguised as a pen, a cigarette case, a lighter, and a cufflink, and assembles it in seconds before firing a single gold-plated bullet. It is a wonderfully theatrical idea — a weapon built to be hidden in plain sight on a man who spends the film hiding in plain sight.

It also makes for a useful identification footnote: sometimes the honest answer to "what is that gun?" is that the props department built it for the film. Not every weapon on screen has a catalog entry, and knowing when you are looking at one that does not is part of identifying the ones that do.

#2: The Walther P99

By the mid-1990s, a pistol designed in 1931 started to look like a period piece, and the franchise went looking for something modern. It found the Walther P99, a polymer-framed pistol introduced in 1996 with interchangeable backstraps and a design squarely in the service-pistol mainstream of the era. The P99 becomes Bond's sidearm in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), carries through Pierce Brosnan's tenure, and returns in Daniel Craig's first films.

The P99 is a good gun and a sensible modernization — and it is also the gun that proves how strong the PPK's grip on the character really is. When the franchise returned to its roots in Skyfall (2012), Q handed Bond a Walther PPK/S, coded to his palm print so that only he could fire it. The modern pistol was never going to stay.

#1: The Walther PPK

Bond's signature gun from Dr. No onward is the Walther PPK — short for Polizeipistole Kriminal, a compact blowback pistol introduced in 1931 and built to disappear under a jacket. It has a double-action first shot, a slide-mounted safety that drops the hammer, and a size that suits a spy who is supposed to be unarmed until the moment he is not. In the novels and early films, it is the 7.65mm (.32 ACP) version Boothroyd recommended in the first place.

It is also the most commonly misidentified movie pistol there is, because Walther made a small family of near-identical guns and most people call all of them "a PPK":

• Walther PP (1929): the original, larger police pistol, with a longer slide, barrel, and grip frame.
• Walther PPK (1931): the shortened version — shorter slide, shorter barrel, shorter grip frame.
• Walther PPK/S (1968): the PPK's slide and barrel on the PP's longer grip frame. It exists because the 1968 US Gun Control Act's import rules were built around size and weight, and the original PPK was too small to qualify. The longer grip adds a round of capacity.

A great many "PPKs" you see on screen, in collections, and in listings are actually PPK/S pistols — and the pistol Q hands Bond in Skyfall is a PPK/S. The fastest tell is grip length: if the grip frame runs the full height of the PP, it is not a true PPK.

Specifications: Walther PPK (the #1)

Honorable mentions

The most famous gun in the franchise that is not held in a hand is the pair of machine guns concealed behind the front indicator lights of the Aston Martin DB5 in Goldfinger (1964) — less a firearm to identify than a piece of cinema shorthand for what a Bond car is. Beyond that, rifles, submachine guns, and henchmen's hardware have passed through the series in every era, but none has the staying power of one small Walther.

Why Bond's gun choices matter for identification

The lesson in Bond's arsenal is that a gun can be a character, and that the exact label matters. "A Walther" is not "a PPK," and "a PPK" is not "a PPK/S" — the difference is a few millimeters of grip frame and a point of firearms-import history. The same discipline that separates a PP from a PPK/S is what separates a real Colt from a clone or a Luger from a reproduction, and it is the skill this blog exists to build, one frame at a time.

For the source of the gun swap that started it all, Ian Fleming's 1958 novel Dr. No contains the original scene in which M orders Bond to give up his Beretta — and is worth reading directly to see how much of that scene the film kept.

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