LIST 33

13 Exotic Guns and Knives

1

Around-the-corner gun

Guns with barrels that curve 90 degrees have been around since the late 1800s, according to the How to Kill series of books. The Kummlauf used by the Nazis is well-known, and the concept made headlines in 2003 when the Israeli Defense Force started using a modern version—the Corner Shot machine gun—for shooting Palestinians.

2

Bio-inoculator

A dartgun that looks like a pistol, used with shellfish poison and cobra venom. This puppy became public knowledge when, during the Church Committee's investigation into CIA crimes, Director William Casey displayed it before the startled Senators.

3

Bottle blowgun

Say you want to send a poison dart into your target's neck, but putting a blowgun to your mouth might tend to attract attention, especially in an urban environment. Well, just get an empty soda can and paint it the color of the beverage it once contained. Run a sawed-off blowgun from the lip to a hole cut in the button. While it looks like you're enjoying liquid refreshment, your actually dealing out horrible death!

4

Brow-beater

This specially-designed gun is built into a soldier's hard-helmet, with the trigger connected to the chin strap. When the soldier opens his mouth, the device fires out of the front of the helmet.

5

Duck's foot pistol

An uncommon design from the olden days, duck's foot pistols were flintlock derringers with two or more barrels that would simultaneous discharge with one pull of the trigger. Usually, the barrels pointed in different directions, so the ammo would fan out over a large area, making this gun good for handling grumbling crowds. One model was made with eight barrels, covering a 120-degree range!

6

Glass knife

Most obviously used for getting past metal detectors, these daggers are sharp but almost invisible.

7

Knuckle pistol

Around five inches long, this homemade number protrudes between your index and middle fingers when you make a fist. Punch someone in the skull or chest to activate the firing pin, which sends a single slug into the victim.

8

Lapel dagger

This flat blade—in the shape of either a long right triangle or a thin pyramid, is the perfect shape to slide into the lapel of a suit coat.

9

Liberator 9MM pistol

Probably the world's smallest gun, this steel and aluminum nine-milli from Stinger Manufacturing is the length and height of a credit card. And, with a width of nine-tenths of an inch, it's not very thick either.

10

Metal Storm

Australian inventor Mike O'Dwyer has created a gun that can fire over one million rounds per minute. The principle involves a unit that houses dozens of barrels, each lined with a row of bullets. Electronic pulses set off traditional gunpowder, launching all bullets in a barrel at once. The pulses are staggered so that each barrel fires a fraction of a second before or after any other barrel.

Wired News reported in 2001: “In a test firing of 36 barrels, lashed together and firing full bore, the gun reduced a series of 15 wooden doors to toothpicks in just two-tenths of a second.” Since then, a protoype has been developed in which the 36 barrels are no longer tied together but are housed in one unit, called a pod.

The US and Australian militaries have granted O'Dwyer's Metal Storm company over $100 million for further development of this mega-gun.

11

Pen gun

Yes, Virginia, there really are guns disguised as pens. America's Office of Special Services and Britain's Special Operation Executive used them in WWII, and Stinger Manufacturing currently makes one, which it claims is the only legal model in the world. Their PenGun looks like a steel pen until you bend it in half, causing the trigger to pop out. You then have a .22 pistol with a single shot. In a related vein, the company's KnifeGun looks like a typical 3.7-inch buck knife, and it does indeed have a retractable blade. But it also has a retractable barrel, which fires a single .22 slug.

12

Rectal knife

Made to be smuggled into controlled settings, like prison, it looks like a slim, three-inch metal tube tucked far up your rear. Unscrew the top, which has a long spike attached, and screw it back on with spike facing outward. Also known as an “arse shiv.”

13

Umbrella poison gun

The most famous victim of this weapon is Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov, who had defected to the UK. In September 1979, he was walking across Waterloo Bridge when he felt a jab in the back of his thigh. A man carrying an umbrella apologized and quickly left the area. By the next morning, Markov was in dire straits, and in a few days he died. The umbrella had been rigged to fire a ricin-containing pellet the size of a pinhead. After Bulgaria's communist government fell, it was revealed that they were behind the assassination.