Alright! It’s time for a blog strictly about guns, ones you might never have heard about before! We’ve been talking about specific products like our LCR .38 5-shot speedloader and 9mm moon clips a lot lately, as well as S&W holsters. Enough talk about what we sell…let’s talk about some weird guns!
Automatic Revolvers
What do you get when you cross a revolver and a semi-automatic? The automatic revolver.
The automatic revolver (technically a semi-automatic revolver) uses the force from the cartridge to automate some of the functions of a revolver, much as a semi-automatic pistol does. And like a semi-automatic, there is a slide that cocks the hammer. Unlike a semi-automatic, it also uses the force to rotate the cylinder. This means that it takes very little effort to pull the trigger the second time, as the draw is unnecessary.
We understand why something like this didn’t catch on. They really don’t offer much advantage over a standard revolver save the fact that the trigger draw is removed. But you have the limitations of the cylinder’s capacity, so you might as well us a semi-automatic.
We are aware of five different automatic revolvers: the Landstad, the Webley-Fosbery Automatic, the Union Automatic, the Zulaica, and the Mateba. Without a doubt the Mateba is the most well known and the coolest-looking. Most recently it has been used in the movies Looper, Gamer, and Serenity.
Bolt-Action Shotguns
Name the different kinds of shotguns. Go!
Chances are you said brake action, autoloader, and pump action. Maybe you even got fancy and said lever action, which were early attempts to replicate the same action of the lever-action rifle. But there’s one other kind that pops up every so often, and that the bolt action shotgun (something you might not know unless you read the spoiler in the heading).
There were early attempts at bolt-action shotguns, much as there were lever-action shotguns. But the design proved to be too slow and cumbersome for most of the applications that people tended to use shotguns for, namely birding. Mossberg put out a three-round 12-gauge after Australian gun law changed and outlawed pump actions and autoloaders, but most people just gave up one round for the more rapid-fire benefits of a double-barreled shotgun.
Duck’s Foot Pistol
If one barrel is good, then two barrels is even better, right? Probably not.
The duck’s foot pistol had between four and six barrels which were set slightly apart and able to fire in multiple forward directions. The idea was that you’d be able to ward off up to six people at once if they were advancing on you. After all, the chances of you hitting more than one of them was pretty good. Why didn’t it catch on? Revolvers, and later semi-automatics, allows someone to fire six shots or more in only slightly more time but with greater accuracy. Also, can you imagine trying to holster one of those things?
Science fiction movies, including the upcoming Valerian and the City of a Thousand Plants, often employ the idea of a gun with two barrels that can split and threaten two people at once. The main villain in the 2011 movie The Green Hornet uses a gun with two Desert Eagles welded together, but we can’t remember if it split or just fired both barrels straight. Honestly, nobody remembers anything about that movie.
Well, we just got going and had to stop. We’ll be back next week to let you know about some other types of guns that might be awesome to look at but never really caught on. Until then, we’ve got speedloaders for the most popular revolvers out there right here.