Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the IRCGN
ballistic lab. This is the French Gendarmerie's
central firearms research collection.
And they have very graciously allowed me to
come in and take a look at some very cool guns
to show to you guys. Today we have
a Croatian Agram 2000 submachine gun here.
And this is a gun that's got a lot of notoriety, it's shown up in some video games.
And it's become really quite well known for its use by
essentially various militia, gangs, organised crime.
Much more so than its original use in the Croatian Independence War.
So, originally this was developed in 1990.
The first production examples were a little bit different than this,
which is the final standard production version.
The early ones actually used a straight sort of Uzi-style magazine,
they didn't have a front grip on them.
That was fairly quickly revisited and they came up with this pattern.
Now, as these were manufactured they have no stocks.
However, they were originally made with a top folding wire stock (or at least a couple of them were),
and they were submitted to the Croatian Army for trials
with the hopes of this becoming a standard Croatian military firearm.
Now while that was going on a bunch of them were manufactured,
and they were used in the Croatian Independence War in 1991/1992.
In particular they were made for, and used by civilian militias and security agencies.
And sort of ... an ad hoc, as needed, weapon by the Army
until they were able to standardise on something else.
But they did see actually a fair amount of front-line service use.
Eventually in '93 they were declined by the Croatian military.
And what's interesting is, at that point, the company was kind of supposed to stop making them.
They didn't, we'll talk about that in a minute.
The designer of this was a guy by the name of Mirko Vugrek, located north of Zagreb.
In fact "Agram" is like the old German word for the city of Zagreb.
So that's where the name comes from.
And he and his son Ivan and his other son Mirko
(so the father is Mirko, and one of the sons is also named Mirko)
ran essentially a small shop, and put together these guns.
... Interestingly, they also actually submitted a pistol for Croatian military trials
it was a copy of the CZ 85.
It lost out to the PHP, which really ought to say something about the quality of that pistol.
But at any rate, there are a lot of misconceptions about how this thing actually works,
as well as some really interesting features. So let's take a look inside.
So here's our Agram. There are only a couple of markings on here.
We have calibre 9mm marked on the left side, these are all 9mm Parabellum.
This one rather interestingly is marked "US Military MP 86" on the side.
Which is almost certainly a fake marking that someone was using
in some sort of scam, ... I don't know to do even what.
But these are not US military, that is totally not a factory mark.
But it's on there, so I figured I'd point it out.
Now a couple of the plastic components have a V in a circle, and that's for Vugrek.
And there we have it on the front grip as well.
These originally were marked "Agram 2000" on this front grip,
and someone has ground those markings off on both sides.
Which tells me they didn't really understand what those markings were,
because that in no way hides the fact that this is an Agram 2000.
And that's the same standard marking moulded into every handguard.
So someone probably thought that was a serial number, and got rid of it for that reason.
Now one of the most interesting aspects to this is
the fact that it was built specifically with a suppressor in mind.
So we have a standard suppressor that threads down over the barrel a bit.
And you can see that the barrel is ported here.
So this will reduce the velocity of cartridges below the speed of sound
so that you don't need subsonic ammunition.
But your suppressor can still deliver a very nice quiet report, because there is no sonic boom.
However, the question arises of course, "What if I don't want to deprecate
the velocity of my ammunition, and what if I don't care about the suppressor?"
Well, the gun also came with a second barrel sleeve
that I can put on here and thread this down.
And that covers the barrel ports so that they don't vent any gas,
so that the muzzle velocity is not impacted.
And ... you would put this on to actually shoot the gun
if you ... didn't care about having it suppressed.
Like I said, in early military trials there was a top-folding stock made for these.
But the standard production guns have no stock at all.
So what you've got is just this, it's very light and very handy.
In fact it's worth pointing out here for a moment, this is often compared to a Beretta PM-12.
Well here is a Beretta PM-12, and the Agram is substantially shorter.
It's also substantially lighter, the Agram weighs in at just 1.8 kilos, that's 4 pounds.
It's a really handy gun, more so than you'd expect looking at pictures of it.
Anyway, ... another interesting element of it is that it actually fires from a closed bolt.
It is hammer fired.
And we have a three position ... selector lever,
so "1" is semi-auto, "R" is repetition or repeat, full-auto, and "S" is safe.
The Agram has a magazine release lever right there.
And it does use its own proprietary magazines. So slightly curved.
This is a double-stack double-feed magazine, a couple of magazine over-insertion stops on it.
You'll often see these with a polymer base plate on them, but this particular one doesn't have that.
They were made in a variety of sizes: 15, 22 and I believe 32 round capacity.
I think this is a 22 round magazine.
So this actually feels like a pretty darn solid magazine.
It looks a little sketchy down here at the bottom, but it doesn't feel flimsy.
Seems like it would work pretty well and be pretty reliable.
So just for reference sake, here's our 22 round magazine, here is a 30, or 32 I believe.
And there was also a shorter, smaller magazine.
And I think it's also worth pointing out the case that this particular gun came in.
Not from the factory, but when it arrived here at the IRCGN collection.
This is of course a law enforcement collection, and when they got it
someone had stuffed it in this little case with a hole cut for the muzzle.
No trigger mechanism in there, it's not entirely clear
what someone was intending to do with this.
Except maybe leave it unzipped and stick their hand inside.
Like, not the most subtle thing ever.
And ... who knows how reliable this would be spitting brass into that case,
and having that charging handle go back and forth.
But kind of funny, that's how it arrived here in the collection.
Now to take it apart we've got one pin that holds the whole gun together.
And it's one of these interesting pins where ... you can see the cross bar there.
If I push the head of the pin in, it will retract those.
Although ... I'm going to grab a hammer here and a punch
and tap this out, because this one is really tight.
Alright, with that pin removed we can just lift the upper assembly out of the lower.
There's a little sling plate back here that just lives
on the recoil spring guide and sits inside, so that comes out.
Taking a look at the inside, we have an actual hammer-fired system.
That's your disconnector right there.
So if I ...
(there we go) release the hammer gently.
There is the hammer for firing. Ejector.
Everything else in here is pretty standard and self-explanatory.
You've got your front grip screwed in in two places.
The magazine appears to be derived from a PPS-43 magazine.
That's it for the back.
By the way, there was eventually very small-scale production of an improved model.
That had a polymer lower assembly instead of sheet metal like this, but those are quite scarce.
This is the standard that's normally found.
Oh, I forgot to point out the sights on this.
We have sort of a typical of a submachine gun, little set front post.
And you'll notice the front sight post is offset on that pin.
So you can adjust your windage by screwing that slightly in or out
to move that pin left or right as needed.
Now the rear sight is an open square notch
with settings for 50 metres and interestingly 150 metres.
Exactly what you would do with a 150 metre iron sight
on a stockless machine pistol, I really don't know.
I think that's probably a call-back to ... testing versions of this that had some sort of stock.
Really not of much use.
Alright, going back to the gun.
We have a single big lug that's used to lock the upper into the lower.
And then an end cap that is just screwed in place.
Now I can tell you one of the reasons, possibly the only reason,
really the only necessary reason,
that the Croatian military decided not to adopt this was because of the recoil spring.
So when I get this all the way unscrewed ...
that recoil spring is going to come popping out (there it is) the back of the gun.
And you have to seriously compress that recoil spring to reassemble this.
The guide rod is barely a third of the length of the recoil spring.
And when you've got this set up to reassemble,
you've got this much length of spring
that you have to compress without the spring kinking in order to put it back together.
And then you have to hold this down inside the receiver tube
while you get this threaded plug started.
And that is a huge pain in the butt.
And to my mind, if I were a Croatian Army trials officer,
that would be enough reason to not adopt this thing in the first place.
Anyway, the rest of ... disassembly is pretty easy.
Pull the handle back to that open hole.
And then we can just pull the bolt out.
Now you saw that it has a hammer firing mechanism in the gun, well, there's your firing pin.
There is a return spring in there, it's a fairly light one, but it does have a firing pin spring.
And it's interesting that this in fact fires from a closed bolt with a hammer.
So again that sort of has the potential for really good first round accuracy,
which is sort of wasted by the fact that there's no stock on it.
Again, if you had that folding stock, you could have something pretty interesting here.
That's pretty much it for the rest of the construction.
The receiver here is just a plain tube,
a little bit of ventilation around where the back of the suppressor would be.
The barrel ... is held in place with that screw.
If we take that off you can see the ventilation holes in the barrel there a little more easily.
There it is, one Agram 2000 all field stripped.
A handy gun, ... a gun that could definitely use some improvements in its disassembly.
And I think a gun that could be much more practical,
it could ... be much better exploited with a few little design changes.
Primarily the addition of a stock, because we really do have a bunch of elements here
that are not particularly useful on a machine pistol,
but would be on a proper submachine gun.
Once the Agram was rejected by the Croatian military, they were supposed to stop making them.
And as a matter of fact they didn't, they continued to make them.
And a lot of them got sold essentially on the international black market.
Which is why this thing now today has a reputation as being a Russian mobster's gun.
There were at least a couple of fairly high profile assassinations carried out with Agram 2000s.
In fact Mirko, the designer, was basically raided by the police in 2006,
had a heart attack and died at age 80, so he was a bit elderly.
But his son Ivan was sent to prison on weapons charges,
got out a few years later, and apparently went back to doing the same thing.
Because he was then arrested again in 2013 on weapons charges, and sent back to prison.
So maybe ... not a coincidence that these are ... typically used by organised crime,
because they were kind of made and being sold to organised crime.
Anyway, it is interesting to handle this.
It is definitely smaller, lighter and handier than I had anticipated.
Like that rear pistol grip is actually substantially too small, at least for my hands.
And if you judge it looking at pictures based on that pistol grip,
the whole gun seems bigger than it really is.
When people compare this to the Beretta PM-12
I think they really get a misconception of the size of this thing.
It's really a very handy little submachine gun.
Anyway, a big thanks to the IRCGN collection for giving me the opportunity to come in here
and film this for you, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.