The Guns of “Die Hard”

Serious Heat — The MP5

While the pistols were neat, the long guns were epic. In the book, the protagonist wielded a Thompson submachinegun and, later, an AK47. For the film, the producers opted for the HK MP5.

Forget Bruce Willis’ snappy comebacks, Alan Rickman’ sinister intensity, and Alexander Godunov’s epic flowing locks, the real star of the film was the HK MP5 submachine gun. These 9mm roller-locked German weapons were both exotic and rare back in 1988 when Die Hard hit the big screen. The fact they had plenty of them just made Hans Gruber’s robbery crew seem all the more professional.

Factory MP5’s were unobtainium on this side of the pond back in 1988. Nowadays factory-perfect semiauto MP5 clones are readily available and reasonably priced. The AP5 from Century has my full-throated endorsement. The original semiauto German 9mm HK 94 was first imported in 1983.

Prior to the cursed machinegun ban of 1986, these roller-locked HK rifles were some of the easiest full-auto conversions on the market. The original castrated HK 94 had a lame 16″ barrel and a restrictor shelf that prevented installation of a factory full auto fire control group. Legally transforming these weapons into machineguns prior to 1986 involved obtaining an approved BATF Form 1, swapping out the semiauto bolt carrier for the full auto sort and trimming off the front of a GI fire control box with a milling machine or Dremel tool. As swapping out a factory barrel on an MP5 is a massive butt-whooping, most of these converted movie guns just had their 16″ tubes pruned back. They can be differentiated at a glance by the lack of a 3-lug suppressor mount on the stubby barrel.

One of the most compelling scenes in the film has McClane commandeering an MP5 from the dead terrorist Tony Vreski played by Andreas Wisniewski. McClane sends Tony’s cooling corpse down the elevator to his friends with, “Now I Have a Machinegun. Ho, Ho, Ho” written on his sweatshirt. While this is a lovely mind game to play with the remaining terrorists, in the book he actually writes, “Now We Have a Machinegun” simply to obfuscate the tactical situation yet further.