WW1 Villar Perosa SMG at the Range

Courtesy of the Morphy Auction Company, I am out at the range today with a very rare Italian Villar Perosa machine gun from World War One. These are pretty unorthodox machine guns, as they were initially designed as aircraft armament and later repurposed as ground guns. The basic design is a pair of actions and barrel with a single rear trigger housing. The actions are (slightly) delayed blowback, feeding from 25-round magazines and firing at about 1500 rpm each. The grip has two separate thumb triggers, wh