NEWS
7 Awesomely Insane Guns People Actually Used
Once we invented the gun, that was pretty much it, right? Sure, all technology advances, new features are added and the design gets tweaked a little over time, but it usually stays more or less the same. Cars always have four wheels, a couple of pedals and some seats, no matter how much we end up fussing with them. So guns consist of one handle, one trigger, one barrel and then the bit that kills people. It’s a tube of death; why mess with the concept? Because you’re a crazy person, that’s why. And that’s how we got these:
The Duck’s Foot Pistol
The duck’s foot pistol, so named because its four splayed barrels were shaped like the foot of a duck (back in the 18th century, when ducks were gargantuan, terrifying steampunk monstrosities with pistols for toes), was designed to take on large groups at close range. It was most popular with officers on sailing ships, who often carried a pair of them to, uh, “discourage” potential mutineers in the cramped quarters.
The immediately apparent problem here — that the rational person would’ve spotted instantly, but the completely insane gun maniac clearly missed because he was too busy firing indiscriminately into crowds — is that you can never hit what you’re actually aiming at with a standard duck’s foot pistol. You can only hit everything else around it, because none of the four barrels point straight ahead. But that just means you have to remember to think a little differently when handling one: Instead of aiming at the thing you want to kill, you just aim at the one thing you like and kill the rest of the world around it.
Key Guns
First used in the 16th century, key guns allowed a jailer to keep his weaponthroughout the entire extremely vulnerable process of opening a cell door, thus never leaving him unprotected. Well, all except for the times when he’s actually using the key/barrel end of the pistol to disengage the lock. That’s right, key guns weren’t just shaped like keys to throw people off or disguise their nature as pistols — they’re both functional keys and functional pistols(presumably so that if some uppity lock ever has the balls to stick on your watch, you can just shoot it off like a Renaissance Bruce Willis).
The LeMat Revolver
So hey, pistol lunatic, what’s the biggest problem with guns in general? That’s right: You just can’t hold as many of them as you want. Barring extensive inbreeding or light to moderate Doctor Octopussing, you only have two hands with which to wield fiery death, and that’s infinity less guns than your insatiable bloodrage demands. Enter the LeMat revolver: Invented in 1856 by Jean LeMat, a New Orleans doctor (who apparently considered that whole “first, do no harm” thing more of a suggestion, really), the LeMat was actually two guns in one:
The top barrel fires .42 caliber pistol rounds, while the second, smaller barrel on the bottom holds a load of buckshot. When he was all finished packing guns into his guns, LeMat brought the prototype to his cousin, a U.S. Army major named Beauregard. Beauregard also thought the gun was a great idea, because gun madness is a hereditary disease passed down along bloodlines, and tried unsuccessfully to get the Army to equip all of their cavalrymen with it. Though it was powerful, the LeMat was deemed too superfluous and not reliable enough for field use. And man, when the Army turns down your weapon for being too kill-hungry, it’s probably time to take a step back and reevaluate your life choices. Maybe also take some vitamin C (it’s a common treatment for gun madness).
The Turbiaux Palm-Squeezer Pistol
The French love their tiny, tiny pistols, presumably because they enjoy the sophisticated dichotomy of adorableness and lethality. One of the smallest ever made was the Turbiaux Palm-Squeezer: Designed mostly for ease of concealment rather than range or stopping power, the Palm-Squeezer was meant to be held with the barrel in between your fingers and the trigger squeezed with the palm.
The Turbiaux could hold anywhere from eight to 10 bullets in its “turret cylinder,” which, combined with its stealthy nature, would seem to make it one hell of an assassin’s weapon.
Harmonica Guns
The 19th century lunatic musician had a tough choice to make: play an instrument, or shoot folks in the face. Now, it used to be that you had to play the people a nice harmonica solo first and then riddle them with bullets while they were clapping, but no longer! These are “harmonica guns.”
The Hand Mortar
Hand mortars, used from the 1500s through the early 1800s, were designed to solve that age-old problem: If there’s somebody standing very far away from you, how do you pull all of his parts off of him without having to walk all the way over there?
The answer, as we all know now, was propelled explosions. We have slick high tech rockets and missiles for that purpose in modern times, but back in the day, the only way to hurl an uncontrolled explosion was with another uncontrolled explosion. Hence, the hand mortar.
It works a little like our current mortars do, in that it uses explosive force to hurl an explosive device a long distance before it explodes. So wait, why is this considered lunacy? It’s a freakin’ handheld mortar; that’s just plain badass. Give two of them to an irate Chilean and let him loose in Detroit, and you’ve got the next Grand Theft Auto. There was only one problem: Back in the day, a grenade had a fuse that you lit before hurling it at your adversary. So after lighting the grenade, you stuffed it down the barrel of the hand mortar and then fired that, hoping against hope that the timing worked as intended. Because if that grenade fuse gets bent double on itself, or clipped, or an errant spark detonates it early, you’ve got a bundle of potential shrapnel in your hand.
Or both hands, depending on how irate and Chilean you are.
Judging by our reader demographics, the answer to both questions is “very.”
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