Legal to use gun names and models?

#1 Trademarks, not copyrights.

You need permission.

#2 You can't call it any thing that uses someone else trademark without their permission. And most of the time you have to change the appearance to make it different also. They trademark the design and image of the items as well.

I am no lawyer but I have read that anyone who makes weapons of the US government has to give up all the trademarks and patents to the US. So things like 1911's and M16 might be ok, but you still could not use Colt or Bushmaster without their permission.

#3 Fallout Tactics has the "Colt .45" as a weapon. See http://www.nma-fallout.com/tactics/items/ .

#4 Colt .45 was a standard issue weapon during WWII and beyond.

#5 The 1911 fires a Colt .45 ACP round. I can only speculate but I usually the name of the company requires the permission from the company, where as the weapon designation is public domain for standard issue weapons. Springfield as well as dozens of others manufactured the 1911 for the US government over the years, and still do with many others offering varying models.

Colt .45 can mean the round not the weapon, there are many pistols that fire Colt .45 ACP rounds, just like Sig .357 refers to a round NOT a weapon. This may be the distinction that they are refering to something in public domain like the designation of the round the pistol fires and NOT the pistol in this case. I know H&K, Sig Sauer, Steyr, and many others protect their IP agressively. They made Raven remove all references to manufatures names from Soldier of Fortune, but the source code still had them in it.

Just ask the Firearms ( mod for half-life ) dev team about this issue, they had to change all references to manufactures trademarked names to just ammo and other spec's as the names of the weapons.

And BTW a pistol is to gun as dingy is to ship, just to make things clear.

#6 Best practices is . . . if it isn't your trademark or copyrighted material then don't use it without explict written permission.