−27%
Palmetto State Armory
Glock 19 Gen5 MOS
$549.99
$399.99
View at retailer
There are no markings on it at all
Every guide to identifying an old gun begins the same way: find the model number. That advice assumes there is one. Sometimes there is not — the stamping has worn away, a previous owner buffed it off during a refinish, rust ate it, or it was never in an obvious place to begin with.
Here is what to do when the gun will not tell you what it is. Work through it in order, with the gun confirmed unloaded and in good light.
First: look harder
Markings hide in more places than people check. Before concluding the gun is unmarked, go through all of these:
- 1 The left side of the barrel, near the receiver The usual location — check it first, but do not stop here.
- 2 Underneath the barrel Only visible with the forend removed.
- 3 The barrel extension or breech end Frequently missed because it is inside the action.
- 4 The receiver flats, both sides On a break-action gun, the flat faces beside the standing breech.
- 5 Under the forend On a pump or a semi-auto.
- 6 Inside the receiver with the action open Look along the sides of the action body.
- 7 Under the buttplate or recoil pad Sometimes stamped, sometimes written in pencil or ink.
- 8 On the trigger guard or the floorplate A common secondary location on sporting arms.
- 9 In the barrel channel of the stock Occasionally pencilled by the factory fitter who matched wood to metal.
Use raking light. Shine a light across the metal from the side, not straight at it. A worn stamping often shows as a shadow when lit from the side even when it is completely invisible head-on. This one technique finds markings people have concluded were gone.
A weak, blurred stamping is itself a finding. It usually means the gun has been buffed and refinished — which also explains where the model number went, and is worth knowing before you spend money on it.
Second: read whatever is left
You may not have a model number, but almost anything else is still evidence:
A gauge and chamber stamp with no model number still tells you what the gun can safely fire, which is the safety question answered independently of identification.
Proof marks identify a country of origin and often a period, which narrows an unidentified import enormously — a Belgian or German stamp means the gun is not an American product at all, and tells you which records might exist. The legend on this site decodes 47 of the common ones.
Barrel steel names — the words stamped along the rib of a double — place a gun in a period and a grade even when the maker's name is gone.
Third: identify it by its features
If the metal will not talk, the design will. Work through the gun systematically and write down what you see — the combination is often distinctive enough that a specialist can name the family even without a mark.
| Feature | What to record |
|---|---|
| Action type | Break, bolt, pump, semi-automatic, lever, revolver |
| Barrels | One, two side-by-side, two over-under, or a combination gun |
| Hammer | Exposed or concealed |
| Magazine | Tube, detachable box, or none |
| Safety | Tang, crossbolt, trigger-guard, or sliding |
| Triggers | One or two |
| Ejection | Extractor only, or automatic ejector |
| Distinctive shapes | Receiver profile, grip shape, sight type, engraving style |
Fourth: consider that it may never have been marked
An unmarked gun is not automatically a fake, and it is worth knowing which kind of unmarked you have before you decide what it is. There are two distinct cases, and they point in opposite directions:
An import that was never required to be marked. In the United States, before 1968 law did not require manufacturers to mark firearms at all. So a gun bearing only an importer's or distributor's stamp may simply be of that era — not a forgery, just a poorly documented one.
An original that was never marked in the first place. Handmade flintlock and percussion firearms were produced by thousands of small individual makers, and they are frequently unsigned, with no certain way to name the maker. A museum reference describes this class bluntly: identification often depends on hands-on examination by an expert, and even then "the identification is often more art than science".
Fifth: where this stops
The honest limit
For a gun with no legible markings, there is a point past which no website helps. The community's own answer to "what is this" for an unmarked arm is to take it to a reputable gunsmith for hands-on identification — and for the unsigned-handmade class above, that is not a deflection but the actual answer.
What you can do from here is arrive at that appointment prepared: the nine locations checked, the features recorded, the photographs taken, any partial stamping documented. That is a materially better starting point than handing over an unidentified object, and it costs you an afternoon.
And treat a forum identification as a lead rather than a verdict. In the discussions this site is built on, the same unmarked revolver drew two confident, mutually exclusive answers in one thread. That is normal behaviour for photo identification, not a failure of any one respondent.
The full inherited-firearm procedure
Proof-mark legend
Build the record card
Where the factory records are
Sources: Sears Guns — "No Markings At All: Identifying an Unmarked Gun" · National Rifle Association museum — on firearms that are hard to identify or value · National Rifle Association — "Proof Marks" reference catalogue · Sears Guns — "Nitro Steel, Krupp and Whitworth: Reading Barrel Steel Markings" · ATF / Federal Register — identification markings placed on firearms, and the Gun Control Act serial-number requirement. Compiled and last checked 2026-10-14.