Palmetto State Armory on Tuesday signaled the end, at least for now, of its love-hate relationship with rebooting the iconic StG 44.
The South Carolina-based gunmaker announced at SHOT '23 that its clone would be the first in what they dubbed the "Battlefield" series of historic guns. PSA had enlisted Mac Steil, the "M" of the defunct Hill & Mac Gunworks, a small gunmaker that had been working on an updated semi-auto Sturmgewehr clone for the better part of a decade but never made it to market.
The guns were to be made with modern techniques complete with a threaded barrel, a long stroke piston operating tilting bolt action, an HK style trigger pack, wooden furniture, and the possibility of being chambered in 5.56 NATO, 7.62x39mm, .300 AAC Blackout, or the original 7.92 Kurz-- the latter is still in production by Privi Partisan in Europe.
However, that bubble now seems to have popped, as PSA announced in a short video this week.
"I wish I had some better news for you today regarding the StG44 but unfortunately I do not. When we acquired the StG44, we had very high hopes to get this gun into the market and get it to you, the end consumer, who has been waiting for this project to come to life," said Cameron Tapler of PSA. "Unfortunately, when we got this gun in our possession and we started looking into it, we have discovered more issues than we anticipated to find. As we started troubleshooting those issues, we started uncovering other issues.
"So at this point, this gun is not ready for production. We have decided to shelve this project for right now to focus on other projects and get them out to the finish line. We have projects that we are currently working on and projects that you don't know about yet that you will find out in the upcoming months that we believe are more important to the firearms market and to our customers than the StG44.
"Again, I want to reiterate the StG44 at this time is an inactive project for us," said Tapler.
Nearly 850,000 StG44s were made during the last part of WWII, but they continued to be used throughout the Cold War, not only by the East German police but also given as military aid by the Soviets. This caused the weapon to pop up in Vietnam, Africa, and the Middle East, most recently in Syria.
