Australian homemade shotgun (courtesy heraldsun.com.au)

“HIGH-powered [I say, I say, HIGH-powered] homemade shotguns being traded on the black market for just a few hundred dollars are the new weapons of choice for drug dealers in Melbourne,” heralds.com.au reports. “Police are raising the alarm over the new wave of backyard weapons, which can fire real 12-gauge shotgun cartridges and are easy to conceal.” Wait. People can MAKE shotguns? Since when? Since ever? Well, um, how does that square with Australian gun control laws? They’re illegal, obviously. But if bad guys can MAKE shotguns there’s no real point in banning them for law-abiding citizens, is there? Let’s take a closer look . . .

Since February more than 20 of the shotguns have been seized in the western suburbs during a series of related operations.

Some were double-barrelled, and one had a light welded to it to illuminate a target. Most have been found in cars, in drug raids on homes, and even being carried by people on the streets.

The guns have the same firepower as conventional shotguns.

Superintendent Stuart Bateson said the guns were a concern although none had yet been discharged in the act of a crime.

“These weapons are volatile and unpredictable,” he said.

“They are very dangerous.”

Recoil altert! (courtesy heraldsun.com.au)

They posed the biggest hazard to those who used them, typically low-end type criminals.

“They are very much likely to blow up in someone’s face,” Supt Bateson said.

“They are not tested, they are not safe.

“The safety of individuals handling these firearms is the most important thing.”

And there I was thinking the greatest danger of these homemade shotguns was bad guys using the guns to commit crimes and, you know, shoot people. Of course, we must, as always, think of the children!

[Police] are warning that children could stumble across the weapons, which look like a piece of steel pipe, putting them in grave danger.

Perhaps the Melbourne police should mount an advertising campaign educating “low-end type criminals, drug dealers and those on the edge” on the importance of safe handling and proper storage of pipe shotguns. If nothing else, recoil. Oh, and it seems that the bad guys aren’t the only ones keeping and bearing these homemade weapons.

[Owners] range from people who have no criminal convictions to others who have long criminal records.

And they generally claim to have been carrying the weapons for self-defence.

“They say it’s so they don’t get rolled. They say: ‘Other people have got them’,” Sen-Det O’Mahoney said.

Roll your own in case you get rolled? Who’d a thunk it? Ralph?

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73 COMMENTS

  2. Crude but effective, within rock throwing distance or less.

    I find it amazing that the powers that be can’t even be shamed into acknowledging the logic of all this, not long ago it was an article on hand made full auto machine pistols being confiscated from criminals there. The response was that more laws were needed to keep ammunition out of the hands of criminals. Guess they never heard of hand loads either?

    I would say dumb, but it’s not, it’s just total dishonesty and power greed.

    In the UK news, two female police officers gunned down, they were of course unarmed.

  4. The cats out of the bag finally on home made firearms. And in case anybody is wondering, full-auto subguns are easier and simple to make than semi-auto guns. Semi-auto are the complicated ones.

    If this keeps up in Australia, at least we can point out to Americans fence sitting between gun rights and gun control the futility of registration and background check schemes.

    • I had a .45 subgun in Vietnam that was made of sheet metal with a screw-on 2″ barrel and a one-piece bolt with a molded in firing pin, fired from open bolt, of course, I would guess somebody reasonably handy with tools could build one in a day, cost around $3. Biggest problem would be the magazine. Semi auto would be MUCH tougher!

    • Exactly so. A straight-line blowback action is a relatively simple, and to make it full auto is actually less work than making it semi-auto. You just start from three parameters:

      1. A pistol cartridge.
      2. Fixed-barrel, straight-line blowback action.
      3. The trigger holds the bot open.

      If you look at the crude, but effective, full auto designs of the Sten and M3 “Grease” gun, you see how crude things can really be – and still work.

      The challenge is to make a barrel. This can be done by learning how to drill a deep straight hole, ream it to final size and finish, then broach the rifling in. Doing a rifle barrel is a Big Deal, doing a 3 to 5″ pistol or sub-gun barrel is much easier.

      • For the purpose of a home-made full auto sub-gun I think you can dispense with the rifling, as long as the bore is reasonably close to the bullet diameter. At the range it’s likely to be used there would be no appreciable difference in accuracy. However, if you insist on rifling it, look at how the black powder rifles were done, a spiral groove around a steel or wood guide with the cutter at the end, easy to do with a little thought.

  5. Safety first, huh?

    Guess banning the quality controlled manufacturing and sale of arms should not have been banned after all.

    That’s what logic seems to dictate, based on those statements.

    • Which is usually the argument made for legalized protitution, drugs and abortions – people will get them anyway, why not make sure they are safe?

        • Agreed. Now, how do we get the far left and far right to agree? Both are going to argue that the similarities are specious.

          With any of these, the only really effective solution is to destroy all existing stockpiles, publicly burn literature teaching how to produce more, executing those with the skills to teach or create/perform, and do the same with anybody and their families if found to have done same or benefitted from the same in the future (as a deterrent). Even then, guns, drugs, etc. will slip through the cracks.

    • I once had a similar design idea using a crossbow bolt. I suppose for self defense purposes the design could be shrunk and use a steel bearing as a projectile. The bearing would be perfectly round, and usually come in sizes that would be convenient to make a barrel for. Hell, you could even make it auto-feeding like a spring BB pistol, just recock it and you’re ready to go again.

      And like you said, it’d be pretty quiet.

        • I’m wondering how long it will be before the ATF realizes that people can actually get killed by something other than firearms, and then start imposing regulations to ban anything that can project a dart, ball bearing, arrow, or anything else capable of putting a person in the deep freeze?
          It’s just a matter of time.

          • It’s not the ATF we need to worry about; it’s our legislative bodies. That’s where our problem lies.

            We all know about gun control.
            We ought to be equally aware that there is quite a bit of knife-control already on the books (switch-blades, gravity knives, etc.)
            . . .
            Now, just how far could our legislative bodies take this? To sling-shots? Say it ain’t so.

            Tragically, it IS so. It’s a felony (or, technically, a crime of the 4th degree maximum 18 months and $10,000) in New Jersey under N.J.S. 2C:39-3c., -3e and -5d. Possession of “any other weapon” (such as a sling shot) “. . . under circumstances not manifestly appropriate for such lawful uses as it may have . . . ” is punishable by these penalties.

            A defendant MIGHT succeed in proving “appropriateness” if he possesses on his property – say in a game room where he maintains a target range or, e.g., in transit to a competition. Odds would be against him if he were merely wandering down-the-street with no “manifestly appropriate” purpose in evidence.

            Those of us PotG habituated to conceding the benefit of the doubt to our elite legislators might imagine that NJ’s legislators studied actual threats to the public safety from sling shots and drafted this prohibition after due deliberation. Tragically, this simply ain’t so. The legislative committee intended to prohibit the infamous “slung-shot”. However, between the committee room and the legislative chamber itself some diligent clerk spotted what he took to be a spelling error. He “corrected” “slUngshot” to “slingshot” making children all over NJ felons.

            Rest assured, however. It remains perfectly legal for you to possess a slUng-shot in NJ.

            There really is NO LIMIT on the extent our legislative elites won’t go to preserve public safety by prohibiting “weapons”.

        • I once built a .45 caliber repeating air rifle based on the Austrian Girandoni military air gun. Only part I didn’t make was the barrel, which was salvaged from a junk muzzle-loader. It has a 22-round magazine, and the stock is also the air reservoir. Not totally silent – it sounds about like a paintball gun. But it will completely bury a .451 lead round ball in a 2X4 (and break a chunk of wood out the other side) with the air reservoir only about half charged. It takes about 1,000 strokes of the single-stage hand pump I made from hydraulic tubing to fully charge the reservoir to around 950 PSI. Certainly powerful enough to be lethal at short range..

          • I imagine it’s semi-auto.
            Does your design lend itself to full-auto?
            If so, then I take it that it’s another example of the absurdity of the NFA and Hughes-Amendment.

            • Look up “Girandoni air rifle” on the web. It is manually operated and gravity fed, and was designed over 200 years ago. It was the only air rifle to ever see military service (Austria). Lewis and Clark had one on their expedition and used it to impress the Native Americans they encountered – they couldn’t understand how it could be fired so often without reloading. Several years back, a couple of Brits had the opportunity to examine one ith the Tower of London that was being disassembled for conservation. They took measurements and made detailed drawings, and published a book called “Construction and Operation of the Air Gun: Volume 1 (the Austrian Army Repeating Air Rifle)”. Volume two was about air canes (“The Walking Stick Air Gun”). They stopped importing the books into the USA when the British Pound skyrocketed against the US Dollar, but I was fortunately able to get both volumes shortly before they became unavailable in the US. It took about a year to complete, since I did it all at work on manual machinery during my breaks (I didn’t have my own milling machine at the time).

              • I now more clearly understand that yours was a faithful reproduction of the original design. In which case, my question was altogether too optimistic.

                If one began with a from-scratch design, it seems conceivable to build an air-gun – which is to say not one that uses any sort of burning or explosive source of power – that would be both:
                – a repeater; and,
                – fully-automatic.

                I’m pretty sure that there are paint-ball guns that are fully automatic. However, they are not designed to fire a hard projectile that would do serious damage.

                From your experience building this serious weapon according to the original design, is my assumption a reasonable one; i.e., that it IS FEASIBLE – using a modern design – to make a repeating, fully-automatic, weapon with a genuinely lethal capacity?

                If so, then it’s one more reason why the NFA with the Hughes Amendment is obsolete.

              • http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2014/05/02/32-cal-caselman-air-powered-machine-gun/

                I bought one of the original Caselman build manuals years ago when they were being advertised in publications like “American Survival Guide”. I never got around to building it, the sticking point being the high-pressire air tank. My Girandoni air tank is rolled, riveted, and brazed 2mm thick sheet steel (like the originals ), and was hydro-tested to 1200 PSI. The Caselman design called for a tank with a 3,000 PSI capacity, and I have no idea where to find something like that. I still want to find a .303 British or 7.7mm Japanese rifle barrel with a decent bore, though, so that I CAN build one eventually.

        • Wow! That’s an excellent point. Spear-gun pistols can be ordered over the internet that are 2 to 2.5 feet long. That’s concealable enough to serve the purpose of armed robbery.

          With that task (armed robbery, rape, assault) in mind, a criminal need not be overly concerned with range or multi-shot capability. He will be either successful in asserting a viable threat; or, he will have his revenge. An un-armed victim (that’s the Utopian goal isn’t it?) isn’t going to represent much of a counter-threat requiring multi-shot capability to escape.

  7. 2 words. Sten gun. 2 more words. Garage workshop.

    Or quit being petty drug dealers and go large, cartel style. Full auto AK’s and rpg’s.

    • I was thinking sten, m’self; simple and effective.

      Ammunition is a lot easier to smuggle than are guns, and as well there’s still a fair amount of it in-country.

  8. “These weapons are volatile and unpredictable,” he said.

    Because they have an evil mind of their own. Hunting down innocent people. Blood in the streets! OMG!

    I’m so glad I send all of mine to a shrink for a good old fashioned MMPI test. Mine are all reasonable, tolerant of others, and predictable. Mine are so nice, I’m going to treat a couple of them and take them to the range this weekend.

    • Thank you for a good laugh. I don’t even treat my guns to a trip to the range. I just walk far enough away from the house to protect my dogs ears and start shooting, All my guns are well behaved and never act up. I have have had a few guns to pout. But when a gun pouts it doesn’t fire at all. Kind of like a woman. I guess that is why we give our guns female names.

    • Part me of is thinking that those lines are directed more towards the design and not towards whatever mystical powers of persuasion some people believe guns have.

    • I think they’ve arrested and put Luty away now about 5 times in the last 10 years. The UK charges him with aiding and abetting terrorists, or some such nonsense.

      • “And the video’s gone.”

        No, it’s not.

        YouTube wants it played on their site.

        Click on the “Watch this video on YouTube” link in the video window…

  11. Shotguns are very simple to make. I used to cobble them together in my basement out of left over lengths of 3/4″ galvanized pipe, duct tape, rubber bands or old springs and old nails for strikers. Total cost — about zero. Accuracy — also about zero, but at close range they could be very effective.

    Oh, and I was ten years old.

    Even a Benelli is just a pipe and some springs with some dressy wood or plastic.

  13. So why 12ga? Are shotguns not as restricted as center fires? I know handguns are very restricted down there. So is it 12ga for ammunition availability ? And since it’s such a crude weapon, you might as well throw out as many projectiles as you can?

    • 12 gauge is good match for common 3/4″ galvanized pipe, which is pretty common. Also, while accuracy of homemade weapons can be problematic, who cares about accuracy when you’re shooting 8 or 9 .32 cal pellets at close range?

      Shotguns are the perfect homemade weapon.

    • 12 guage is centerfire… Also, shotguns are pretty much the easiest guns to make. Two pieces of pipe, an endcap, and a nail. Voila.

    • The nominal bore diameter of a “standard” 12ga shotgun is 0.729″. “Back bored” shotguns are now running bore diameters up to 0.745″.

      Well, what’s 0.005″ between friends, right? Choosing a shell with a particular generous skirt on the wad/buffer means that it will still open far enough to obdurate the bore. Drill a hole in the end cap to get a firing pin (most likely a rounded-off nail) to impact the primer and Bob’s your uncle.

      Other shotgun gauges aren’t quite so amenable to fitting a production shotgun shell so well.

      • 1/2 pipe fits 28 gauge very nicely, with 3/4 as the outer pipe receiver, and 3/8 pipe fits 410/44/45/12mm cartridges.

  14. “The safety of individuals handling these firearms is the most important thing.”

    Then give the individuals a real SBS, At least to those who have no criminal record.
    (Sighs as it’s not going to happen)

  15. what is absolutely mind bogglingly funny whilst incredible is the grand surprise of…………homemade guns.

    Incredible………….not so much……..it seems every so often people rediscover……..what always was.

  16. Since the days of the cave man humans have been inventive tool makers and tool users. Only government bureaucrats and politicians didn’t see this coming. The idiots that seem to gravitate to elective office and their leftist buddies think they just need to pass another law to fix something that can not be fixed.

    Given half a chance they will bend your ear about the “Social Contract” and how if everyone would just do what the divinely (note lower d cause they don’t like God) inspired leadership tell us to do, then Unicorns would fart rainbows, we would all have a pony, and whorled peas would break out all over. Utopians unite! Hillary Clinton is the smartest woman in America! Those terrible Tea Party people hate blacks and gays and unicorns!

    The drivel those leftists spout to justify their crazy ideas….

  17. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: guns are state-of-the-art 19th century technology. The more advanced models, semiautomatic pistols and rifles, are trickier, but if your society has the capacity to make bicycles, it has the capacity to make pretty much any firearm. And as has been mentioned, a basic shotgun is dead simple. It’s easier than assembling IKEA furniture.

  18. Yup, slam fire shotguns are easy to make. All they are is two pieces of steel tube with the barrel and chambered shell slamming onto a fixed firing pin. These type of shotguns were used in WW2 in the Pacific theater. They were made for sale in the US by Richardson Industries and called the Guerrilla Gun. Iraqvetern did a nice video on youtube about them.

    http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/d9/61/76/d96176211301b969189f47d0c987f3c7.jpg

    Would be a good weekend project in the garage.

  19. If you make normal society a big jail with so many rules to break, this is one way they get broken so well and good. Just like in a real jail. Ain’t the social doodlers sumthiing to watch!

  21. Wow, pipes? Gonna blow themselves up…

    I’m still waiting on the Form 1s for the legit structural tubing .410 zip guns I want to make…

  22. I call BS as I know drug dealers can and usually do better than this. Pipe guns are fine and dandy but concealable? And I get the idea of slam fired but not so sure what was going on with that thing in the pic.

    Its druggies we are talking about people. They would trade their soul for magical dust and rocks. I am pretty sure you could find 3 or 4 thousand in Melbourne that would trade a factory made firearm for a few grams of chemically goodness.

  23. Home made guns are the best argument against point-of-sale gun-control.
    If a society wants to keep guns out-of-the-hands of “the wrong people” the ONLY thing that works to any extent is enforcing felon-in-posession. Unless and until our criminal justice system decides to enforce felon-in-posession gun control is a futile exercise in security theater.

    • ” the ONLY thing that works to any extent is enforcing felon-in-posession.”

      Wrong. WRONG. W.R.O.N.G.

      You are coming at it from a gun controller’s POV.

      If the dude IS a felon, he should be in prison. Period.

      If he WAS a felon, and was legitimately released, he should morally get all his second chances. If he is not “rehab’d” enough to trust him with that, then he still IS a felon and should be in prison.

      This “felon in possession” stuff is ridiculous. You are not going to keep guns out of ANYBODY’S hands…so that whole approach to solving ANY problem is a red herring.

      • I understand the principle of your argument. I find it appealing. It’s simply not politically viable.

        We need to decide whether we are going to try – and fail – to advance gun rights with arguments that can’t be sustained politically; or, whether we are going to try – and hopefully succeed – with arguments that are politically palatable.

        Each of the criteria in the prohibited-person law is suspect. The whole law needs to be overhauled. That is an exercise worth doing; but it’s beyond the scope of this discussion.

        Stripping a person of his gun rights for life upon conviction of a felony is Constitutionally permissible. It might be good or bad public policy. The Constitution doesn’t compel governments to disarm felons. I’m assuming that you aren’t making an argument against felon-in-posession on Constitutional grounds; but rather on public policy grounds. (You might also make an unconstitutionality argument; however, you would have a very difficult time finding any judges or legislators who would take the unconstitutionality argument seriously.)

        Now, what shall we say to the voters that we propose to do with the gun rights of all the felons?
        – restore to each of them – violent and non-violent alike – gun rights upon release?
        – keep the violent felons in prison for life?
        – round-up all the released violent felons and put them back in prison for life?

        The public wouldn’t subscribe to any of the foregoing solutions. Each is a non-starter. As such, insistence on the principle (if you can’t trust him with a gun you can’t trust him at liberty) is tantamount to accepting the situation we find ourselves in today. I share with you sympathy for a goodly number of felons whose rights ought to be restored. So, what should we tell these felons? ‘Sorry, but we stand on principle. Unless and until we can achieve a perfect solution you guys are going to have to accept the status quo.’

        I’d rather work on restoring funding to the DoJ program (currently authorized by Congress but defunded). Funding this program should be politically achievable in the realistic future. The most worthy felons would probably have their rights restored. Somewhat less worthy felons would probably have to wait for relief.

        Governments want to make as many of us as possible into felons; but that is a topic for a separate discussion. It serves governments’ purposes to keep us all under its oppressive thumb.

        Our concern here would be better focused on reducing the criteria for becoming a prohibited person. E.g., the criteria that makes you prohibited if you were convicted of a crime calling for imprisonment exceeding 1 year notwithstanding that you were actually sentenced for a lesser term. That subtle change has a possibility of passing Congress and would have a far greater effect than standing on principle of keeping felons in jail for life.

  25. Heck, I’m a CNC machinist, AND I built a 3-D printer from scratch as well. Wanna ban guns? I’ll STILL have them! I can even machine cartridge cases in a pinch. Not hard to program a CNC lathe to turn them out in quantity from brass (or even aluminum) bar stock. Primers and gunpowder can be improvised as well from common substances. Time consuming, but it proves the futility of banning guns and ammo. Someone wants them badly enough…where there’s a will, there’s a way!

    • I have a question for you. Have you, or could you, make a simple functional gun on a CNC machine in a relatively few steps that would lend themselves to being captured on YouTube video?

      What I’m thinking about is a relatively short video – say 5 minutes – that would show in normal speed the set-up and removal of a few parts and their assembly. The countless steps of the CNC machine(s) would be high-speed and impossible to follow; however, the viewer could imagine that this process really is occurring under computer control.

      My first thought was to do this with an 80% lower receiver and Ghost Gunner. Then, as a model to illustrate the assembly, maybe find some 13 year-old girl who knows how to put an AR-15 together.

      I quickly concluded that the AR-15 and 80% receiver would not have the desired impact. The general public is concerned with hand guns, not rifles. Moreover, it’s infeasible to CNC make all the numerous parts of an AR-15. (Possible, but not feasible as a demonstration).

      I’m more thinking about, e.g., a revolver. The demonstration would need to show the CNC production of just 2 parts: frame with barrel; and, cylinder. To exclude the cottage-industrial production of hammer, grips, springs and screws would not be construed as misleading.

      We might all pray that such a video would go viral; however, this would be too much to hope for. It might be realistic to expect it to get a lot of play over a protracted period. Whenever point-of-sale gun-control is brought-up we link to the video. if a few minutes of watching the video convinces a viewer that point-of-sale gun-control is futile then that’s one more skeptic.

      We need a “marketing plan”. Teenaged boys are keen on violent video games, guns, computers and the internet. It shouldn’t be hard to to achieve “impressions” in this audience. Here, there is a possibility that the video might go viral!

      Bear in mind that their sisters and parents are not equally likely to watch this video. However, whenever gun-control comes up in a conversation where one of these teenaged boys is present, he’s apt to pipe-up. “Hay, that’s not really going to work. If you choke-off the supply of guns, criminals will just make their own. I saw a YouTube video where the guy made a gun . . . ”

      That seed of skepticism is planted in that teen-aged boy’s mind, and it propagates to his sister; and to his voting parents. “My brother / son saw this video that shows how . . . ”

      The key is – I think – to make the video really convincing. I.e., to show the audience how anyone with a machine and a single machine-shop course really could produce modest quantities of functional guns. Videos from overseas aren’t really very effective to this purpose. American’s can’t imagine gang-bangers having the skills and patience to hand-craft ergonomic and task-suited guns. It’s too great a leap for them to imagine that the Mafia would cheerfully build and staff clandestine arsenals.

      • RIght now it would be a bit hard to do. I made an 80% lower at my job when I first started there – just a matter of plugging the CAD drawing into the CAM software we were using at the time (Work NC). However, I was on night shift at the time and was able to do it discretely . I was only allowed to make it to 80% so as to not violate company weapons policies. I finished it at home on my manually operated benchtop machine at home (a Sieg X2 from Harbor Freight Tools). Things have tightened up since then, and there is no more night shift, but I am working on converting the X2 to CNC. Meanwhile if I want a lower badly enough (or, say, a Ruger 10/22 receiver, or a Liberator, or a high-capacity AR magazine, etc.), I have all of the FOSSCAD Mega-Packs (downloaded from The Pirate Bay) that I can use on my home-built Mendel90 3-D printer. These are tested designs, supposedly. Included in the latest FOSSCAD pack are the WarFairy lowers that have integral buffer tubes and therefore eliminate the weakest point of 3-D printed lowers (the buffer tube tower that the buffer tube screws into).

        • It’s very kind of you to respond. Thank you.

          I’m not so much interested in whether YOU in particular could do it.
          The question I’m wondering about is whether the sort of video I imagine is feasible under ideal conditions (which might be searched for later.)

          The key element in my question is whether there is a known design – ideally with the program already written and tested with a successful prototype. The essential characteristic of the design must be that a very few parts can be CNC machined and then assembled into a working instance.

          I’m thinking of a revolver as contrasted with a semi-auto. (You may know of a better idea; or know why a revolver wouldn’t work). I think that there are only 3 significant parts to demonstrate machining:
          – barrel
          – frame
          – cylinder

          I don’t think it’s essential to illustrate rifling the barrel; simply turning a piece of tube stock into a barrel with a thread should suffice. The frame and cylinder should be straight-forward; set-up suitable rectangular stock and mill-away.

          Admittedly, there are several other small parts: springs, hammer, trigger. I don’t think there is any loss in authenticity to buy these other small parts. If one demonstrates the ability to machine the 3 major components it is reasonable to assume the smaller components can be similarly fabricated as well.

          Critically, the whole process of set-up and removal of the machined parts must appear to be relatively straight-forward. As plug-and-play as possible. It should be clear to the viewer that “any fool” could set-up the stock and push the button. That part might not be a fully accurate claim; I imagine that a successful part would require at least one vo-tech course in machine shop.

          The point I’d like to make is that there must be at least one “youth” in every inner-city with the talent as a craftsman and the diligence of a student to complete one machine-shop course.

        • I think the best design for a revolver you make in a manual shop as a starting project is a flop-top.

          People should not misunderestimate the hassle of making the lockwork parts. They’re small, they’re fiddly, they require accurate angles and heat treating. The Colt double-action revolver design is most adaptable for fitting with files and stones. The S&W design would require making the box for the rebound spring with a stub coming off the side. That’s a tad complicated. The Ruger design with coil springs might be easier to pull off.

          The long and short of it is, the bigger pieces are relatively easy to machine. You can get hold of them to machine them. When you get into smaller parts, you often have to start creating workholding fixtures to keep the parts held firmly and at the correct angles.

          Or you need to have ninja hand file skills.

  27. Do not forget the “atlatl” for spear throwing. Prehistoric Humans killed Woolly Mammoths with those things and stone tipped spears.
    When I was a kid we made a wicked spear thrower out of a 4 ft length of broom handle, a large, sharpened nail, some plastic tape and an atlatl made out of a piece of flat steel we bent in a vise. We could pierce a target of scrap half inch common plywood at 15 feet easily after a bit of practice, but sometimes the nail would bend like a Roman pilum and have to be replaced. I had read about atlatls and spears in a book on Prehistoric Man my Mom bought me. My Brother and I and two other boys our age (8-10 yrs) in our neighborhood made a lot of different improvised weapons just in the course of play to see if we could do it.. After a few days my Mom realized what we were up to and put a stop to the spear and atlatl fun.

    The slam-fire shotguns reminded me of a “zip-gun” shown to my Church Youth Group by the local PD during a presentation on “street gangs” and improvised weapons they used.. It was a pistol that fired 12 gauge shotgun shells through 3/4 inch steel pipe, but it had a “hammer” and trigger powered by some means and was mounted on a pistol-shaped wooden stock. Bulky but concealable. Very illegal in 1961, owing to the short length and, I believe, NFA 1934. Not sure why anyone would bother in those days, since you could buy guns mail order.

  28. A bang stick is what is used to repeal sharks. It is a shotgun shell on a stick and of course it works underwater. So easy to make and being a machinist for awhile easy to make a 6 shooter. However not necessary here in America. Does everyone know that bleach and ammonia make a type of mustard gas? NEVER clean with these two!
    No double standards put the DC politicians on Obamacare and SS.Thanks for your support and vote.Pass the word. mrpresident2016.com

    • Bleach and ammonia don’t make mustard gas (which is a blister agent), but rather it releases CHLORINE gas, which was also used in WWI. Chlorine gas turns to hydrochloric acid when it combines with water, and causes damage to moist organs like your eyes and lungs.

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