Something I Seem To Recall About The C96 Pistol

Please forgive me if I am wrong, but I seem to recall having read that one of the first engagements involving semi auto firearms was an event in the U.S. between two brothers armed with C96 pistols facing off against revolver armed policemen following a bank robbery. Only after they had expended all of their ammunition were these two men able to be defeated.

However, I can not remember any details or names from my reading and have been unable to find any account matching the event in my head. Perhaps I am wrong, but if this sounds familiar to anyone who knows the details, please let me know.

I did a good bit of searching and wasn't able to come up with anything.
Sounds like a really interesting story though and would love to hear more if anyone knows of it.
There are A LOT of movies featuring the C96 and clones though....

I do not think that happen in the US. I seem to remember that two "Anarchists" tried to rob a bank in the UK and where they trapped by the police after the bank robbery went bad. I believe they were armed with C96s as they were the favor gun of the Anarchist movement. Some of the UK folks probably can throw some light on that one.

That helped!
The details sound vaguely like the Siege of Sidney Street:
Siege of Sidney Street - Wikipedia

Police outgunned by better weapons (included the C96) call in military reinforcements from the Tower of London.

Clearly that is it. I had definitely corrupted some of the details, human memory being a poor medium, but this is what I was looking for. Thanks!

"...Police outgunned by better weapons..." Hard not to be outgunned when you don't have a firearm to start with. That'd be a story in England, but wouldn't even make the papers in North America. There would be no records of such an event, Stateside.
Winston carried a C96 at Omdurman in 1898, so a gun fight in 1911 London(lots of semi-auto pistols around by then) wouldn't have been one of the first engagements.

The two weapons dug out of the ruins of No.100 Sidney Street after the fire, which I examined some years ago, now in the City Police's ownership and currently in the Metropolitan Police's black museum are a .32 FN Browning 1900 and a short-barreled C96. Both have been damaged by fire. The Browning's magazine is bulged by an internal explosion and partially jammed in place.

The police borrowed shotguns from a gunsmith in Houndsditch, and Morris Tube rifles from a shooting gallery. Eventually a party of Scots Guards from the garrison at the Tower were summoned - and finally, much too late to be of any use, two 13-pndrs of the Royal Horse Artillery.



The affair is also notable for being one of the first developing news events to be covered by newsreel movie cameras, who arrived in the later stages of the siege and got the film edited and into the picture palaces by the end of the week.



London - Sidney Street Siege (1911) - YouTube



The movie version with Peter Wyngarde used P38's.