What’s the Oldest Gun Still Being Made Today?

It sounds like a simple question. What’s the oldest gun still being made today? But the answer depends entirely on what you mean by “still being made,” and that turns out to be a surprisingly deep rabbit hole.

Some designs are still sold new but are really modern reproductions. Some ran for over a century and then quietly stopped. Here’s the honest answer to the oldest gun still made, with the fine print that most lists skip.

First, the catch: “still made” has three meanings

Before we name a winner, you have to split the question into three. There’s the oldest design you can buy new in any form, the oldest design still made by its original maker, and the oldest gun produced with no break at all.

Those three questions have three different answers, and a lot of confident articles quietly mix them up. We will keep them separate.

The technicality: muzzleloader reproductions

If “any form” is the rule, the oldest designs win on a technicality. You can walk into a shop today and buy a brand-new Brown Bess musket of the pattern that armed redcoats in the 1700s, or a percussion Colt 1851 Navy revolver, both made by Italian firms like Pedersoli and Uberti.

But these are honest reproductions, not unbroken production. The original designs went out of manufacture a century or more ago and were revived. So they’re guns you can buy new, but they’re not really the oldest gun “still” made in the truest sense.

The strongest answer: the Colt Single Action Army of 1873

For the oldest design still made today by its original manufacturer, the best answer is the Colt Single Action Army, the 1873 “Peacemaker.” Colt still lists it today, more than 150 years after it first appeared.

The honest caveat: it has not been truly continuous. Colt built the first generation from 1873 to 1940, paused for about fifteen years, then brought it back in the mid-1950s when television Westerns created a new demand. So the right phrase is “in near-continuous production across three centuries,” made by the same company that invented it. The revolver that armed the cavalry at Little Bighorn is still on Colt’s price list.

The runner-up: the Smith & Wesson Model 10 of 1899

The strongest near-continuous survivor is the Smith & Wesson Model 10, the .38 Military & Police, which dates to 1899 and is still made today. It was the standard police revolver for the better part of a century.

With more than six million made, it is the most-produced handgun of the 20th century. Its production claim is “almost continuous,” which is a hair less clean than you might hope, but it’s one of the best answers going for a gun that has genuinely stayed in production since the 1800s.

The ones that came back: Winchester 94 and Mauser 98

Two legends belong here with an asterisk. The Winchester Model 1894, the classic American deer rifle and the best-selling sporting rifle in U.S. history, ran from 1894 until the New Haven plant closed in 2006. It was reintroduced a few years later, now built in Japan.

The Mauser 98, the bolt action that every hunting rifle on earth copied, dates to 1898. Mauser sells an M98 today, but the current rifle was reintroduced in 2009, built from the original drawings. Both are old designs you can buy new, but both had a clear break in the line. This is the crucial distinction. A gun that stopped, changed hands, and restarted is not continuously made; it is revived. Continuity, not just the model name surviving, is what separates the Colt from the comeback kids.

The design that’s everywhere: the 1911

John Browning’s 1911 pistol is more than a century old and is still among the best-selling handgun patterns in America. Colt, Springfield, Kimber, Ruger, Wilson Combat, and dozens of others build it, and we rounded up the best Colt 1911 pistols if you want a modern one.

The catch here’s different. The 1911 design has been made continuously, but not by one unbroken product line. It’s a pattern that many companies produce, rather than a single gun rolling off the same bench since 1911. Still, as living designs go, it’s remarkable.

The record that died in 2020

The cleanest answer of all used to be the Marlin Model 39, a lever-action .22 whose lineage runs to 1891. For about 129 years it was produced with no real break, which made it the genuine record holder for the longest continuously produced firearm in the world.

Then Remington, which owned Marlin, went bankrupt in 2020, and the Model 39 fell out of production. Ruger has since revived other Marlin lever guns, but not the 39. So the gun with the best unbroken claim of all is, for now, no longer made. Records don’t last forever.

So what’s the oldest gun still made?

Put the fine print together and the answer is clear enough. The oldest gun design still made today by the company that invented it’s the Colt Single Action Army of 1873. The strongest near-continuous survivor is the Smith & Wesson Model 10 of 1899. And the cleanest unbroken record belonged to the Marlin 39, until it stopped in 2020.

The deeper lesson is that a great design never really dies. It just waits for the next generation to want it again. For more, see the most famous guns in history and the 14 guns that changed the world.

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