Weird guns

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The Duck's Foot Pistol


The duck's foot pistol was named so because its four splayed barrels were shaped like the foot of a duck (back in the 18th century, when ducks were gargantuan, terrifying monster with pistols for toes), it 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 that 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.

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Key Guns


it was first in the 16th century, key guns allowed a jailer to keep his weapon throughout 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. hence 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).

 

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The LeMat Revolver

what IS 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 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 you should also take some vitamin C (it's a common treatment for gun madness).

The Turbiaux Palm-Squeezer Pistol

French has always 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 is 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.However, the Turbiaux's bullets fell much closer to the "cute" axis of the French Firearms Scale of Preciousness and Death, so shooting a fellow with it was more a means of expressing your general displeasure with his choice of hat than a viable method of actual assassination. Plus, if the victim didn't die from the initial hail of micro-bullets, you had to fully dismantle the gun just to reload. So if you combine all of those facets -- limited lethality, easy to conceal in the palm, practically zero range -- it wasn't really a gun at all. It was more of a precursor to the joy buzzer, back in an era when men were men, bullet wounds were a funny prank and electricity only happened when God was displeased with something.

 

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Harmonica Guns

The 19th century insane 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."
Well, OK, technically they weren't functional harmonicas -- it's just that their loading mechanisms somewhat resembled the instruments, as opposed to the rotating cylinders or clips we all know and love and do murders with today. That lump of metal hanging over the side may have had some benefits, in that it caused fans of soulful wind instruments a moment's confusion before you shot them in the mouth, but it had some drawbacks, too: For one, the off-side weight made the gun difficult to aim. For two, reloading after a single firing meant that the operator had to manually slide the harmonica magazine across to the next round precisely so as not to overshoot the chamber.

Oh, and aside from appearance, there's another similarity between harmonica guns and musical instruments: If you move or place your fingers wrong, you'll produce an extremely unpleasant noise. In music, that means an off-key note; in gunplay, that means the magazine was left between chambers and might chain-fire, thus exploding all of your fingers off.

 

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The Hand Mortar

Hand mortars were 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 name 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.

 

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Pepperbox Guns

just like any other modern pistol, pepperbox guns hold multiple bullets for repeat firing. However, unlike those damned communist revolvers, a pepperbox doesn't believe in "sharing for the common good." Each bullet gets its own private barrel, and probably a two-car garage and a nice lawn to tend, too. That's what American Dream is all about, after all: A gun barrel for every citizen.So wait, what's the problem here? You can duel-wield mini guns, right?! Give two of those to a disgruntled Belgian and set him loose in Tokyo, and you've got the nex -- well, you get the idea. But there's a good reason that, outside of Metal Gear Solid, you don't see many soldiers walking around wielding mini guns themselves: They're usually mounted to vehicles or on stands.That's because the weight of the barrels is simply too much to aim precisely, and keeping a steady supply of ammunition -- which, in the pepperbox's case, was loaded manually by hand-rotating the barrel between shots -- is too complex for feasible use on the battlefield. But maybe we're just being wussies here: That six-shot pepperbox up there doesn't look too heavy. But then, what's the point of that? If it's only six shots, that's just a standard revolver.Which is why most pepperbox guns came with more barrels -- some with 18 or even 24.Even if you could haul that bastard into an upright position long enough to empty all of your chambers, it's been estimated that it would take one man anywhere between 40 and 60 minutes to reload it after a single volley. That's somewhere around 40 to 60 minutes longer than you want to spend weaponless while getting shot at by other men with equally ludicrously oversized hand pistols.

 

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if you want "intensely impractical but looks ----ing bitching to use," well, lunatics of the previous centuries had your back in better ways: Here's the swordcanevolver.

The Apache revolver, oddly enough, was named for the French Les Apaches and not the Native Americans. While it was noted that, due to the lack of barrel and small caliber, the Apache was not a very effective firearm, shootpunchstabbing enthusiasts did clarify that it still "proved deadly at extremely close range." So no, we're not just being our usual hyperbolic man-child selves when we insist that one operated this gun by "punching bullets into the stab wounds on your enemies' damn heads." That shit was in the manual.

 

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Cemetery Gun

"Cemetery Gun" is a rather ominous name for a weapon. But it is named for the location in which it was used—not the location in which its victim ended up. So why would anyone need a gun at a cemetery? First, let's look at the time period during which it originated.

The cemetery gun appeared on the scene in the 18th century when grave robbery was a common occurrence. Also known as a "set gun," this weapon was a booby trap that was set to fire at cemetery intruders. A simple trip wire was used to set the trap. When a grave robber or other intruder tripped the wire, the cemetery gun would fire in his direction.

Similar guns are sometimes called "alarm guns" as they are loaded with blank cartridges. When the blanks fired at an intruder, they both frightened the intruder and alerted others to his presence. This could be an effective and non-lethal deterrent.

 

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The Hand Mortar

Hand mortars were 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 name 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.

 

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Colt Revolving Rifles

While these rifles were a good increase in firepower for the people of the Old West starting in the 1830s, they had some very noticeable drawbacks. For all variants, there was a leak of the gases of firing at the front of the cylinder and a corresponding drop in muzzle velocity. For the double-action variants, as the cylinder cycled for each shot the just-fired tube had a tendency to send hot gas at the hand of the firer. This only ranks a 10 on the list because the problems were tolerable in comparison to the benefits of more firepower.

 

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The Liberator

The Liberator was a single-shot pistol stamped out of sheet metal for dropping behind enemy lines into the hands of resistance movements during WWII. It was lacking because you only got a single .45 ACP shot at an enemy who probably had a semi-automatic pistol/rifle or a fully automatic submachine gun. Also reloading was extremely troublesome as you had to push a stick down the barrel to push the spent cartridge out.

 

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Boys Anti-tank Rifle

The Boys Anti-tank rifle was an early anti-tank weapon unsuccessfully used at the beginning of WWII. It was a five-shot rifle that weighed 16.33kg (36lb) and fired a 13.97mm (.55) caliber armor-piercing round capable of penetrating 21mm of armor at 300m. It was under-powered at the start of WWII as it could not cope with German panzers armor. It was also a bit heavy for a soldier to lug around and its recoil was ferocious.