If you run into one Madsen gun, it’s a fun story; if you run into Madsen guns every day, you might be a Brazilian police officer or criminal. The Madsen machine gun, a weapon designed in 1902, is still in service. If you’ve ever cruised South American police footage on YouTube because it’s 3 AM and you’ve gone down a few odd rabbit holes, you have seen Brazilian forces doing favela ops wielding the historic weapon like a rifle.
When I was traveling down one such rabbit hole, I was amused to see the Madsen once, but then I kept seeing it. Different videos, different police officers, and different gunfights. It turned out the Madsen is quite common in Brazil and heavily used among police forces.
History of the Madsen Machine Gun
The Madsen is a pre-World War I machine gun designed by Danish engineers Julius A. Rasmussen and Theodor Schouboe. The weapon gained its name from Colonel Vilhelm Herman Oluf Madsen, the Danish Minister of War, who recommended the weapon for Danish military service and helped design the self-loading rifle that predated the Madsen machine gun.
Inside the gun, we have a complicated mechanism that’s a bit of a combination of both short and long recoil designs. The bolt works on a short recoil principle that cams upward and away from the breech. The barrel and barrel extension continue to move rearward in a movement that exceeds the length of the cartridge, making it a long recoil system.
The Madsen gun feeds from a top-loaded magazine offset from the receiver to the left-hand side. Throughout history, the guns have been adopted by dozens of different military forces and chambered dozens of different cartridges. Brazil adopted the weapon in small numbers after World War I.
America supplied Madsen machine guns to Brazil for the Brazillian Expeditionary Force in World War II. These were .30-06 variants and saw combat with Brazil’s forces.
The Madsen in Brazil
The Brazilians clung to the Madsen Machine Guns, which remained in service with the military until 1996. In the 1950s, the Brazilian military converted their .30-06 and 7x57mm Mauser Madsens to .308. The police use of Madsen machine guns goes back to the 1930s.
The military provided police forces with Madsen guns to fight the rise of the Cangaceiros. These Cangaceiros were violent bandits that constantly clashed with police forces. The police needed more and more firepower, and the Madsen evened things out.
In the modern era, the majority of Madsen machine guns used by police forces were donated by the army when they got rid of the guns. Some also came from criminals who had stolen them or smuggled them in from other countries. Both regular police forces and the Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais, aka the Special Police Operations Battalion, use them.
Why the Madsen?
The Madsen is an ancient weapon by all standards. The gun was designed and produced in 1902. For comparison, sliced bread was first sold in 1928. The Madsen is older than sliced bread, and with that age comes a novel and overly complicated design. If it breaks, it’s going to be tough to fix, but the guns seemingly don’t break.
Second, the Madsen machine gun weighs 20 pounds. That’s not bad for a military weapon in 1902, but it’s hefty for an urban police rifle in 2024. It’s also 45 inches long, so good luck clearing rooms with it. Why are Brazillian police forces still wielding the gun?
The first reason is that they have them on hand. Sometimes, you use what you have, not what you want. Second, the drug war in Brazil is a lot different than the drug war here. These cops are in full-on gunfights on city streets. It’s more Fallujah than Detroit. The weapon’s suppressive capabilities are appreciated and used as an automatic rifle to suppress the enemy.
The slow rate of fire and ease of control allows for superior accuracy compared to other automatic weapons. Some sources, translated from Portuguese, claim the weapon’s sound plays a factor in its deployment. A machine gun firing full-power rifle rounds degrades enemy morale.
One common factor I saw in these Brazillian police footage videos is failures with their varied M4 and FAL-type rifles. Guys were stripping their guns to get them fixed and back into the fight. The Madsen machine guns remained in the fight. They are more reliable than some of the overworked rifles.
From Denmark to Brazil
The Madsen machine gun lives on! Most of these videos don’t have dates, but one date I did see was 2018, which means even if the Madsen isn’t in service now, it was in use until at least 2018. That’s an insane lifespan. It’s not the best weapon for the role, but it’s clearly working when needed.
