The

Winchester Winchester is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city in Hampshire, England. The city lies at the heart of the wider City of Winchester, a local government Districts of England, district, at the western end of the South Downs Nation ...

Liberator was a 1962 prototype 16-gauge, four-barrelled

shotgun A shotgun (also known as a scattergun, or historically as a fowling piece) is a long gun, long-barreled firearm designed to shoot a straight-walled cartridge (firearms), cartridge known as a shotshell, which usually discharges numerous small p ...

, similar to a scaled-up four-shot

double action Double action (or double-action) refers to one of two systems in firearms where the trigger both cocks and releases the hammer. *Double-action only (DAO) firearms trigger: The trigger both cocks and releases the hammer. There is no single-action f ...

derringer. It was an implementation of the

Hillberg Insurgency Weapon Hillberg is a surname. Notable people with the surname include: * Linnéa Hillberg (1892–1977), Swedish actress * Robert Hillberg Robert Hillberg (August 27, 1917 – August 12, 2012) was a firearm designer and the head of Research & Developmen ...

design. Robert Hillberg, the designer, envisioned a weapon that was cheap to manufacture, easy to use, and provided a significant chance of being effective in the hands of someone who had never handled a

firearm A firearm is any type of gun designed to be readily carried and used by an individual. The term is legally defined further in different countries (see Legal definitions). The first firearms originated in 10th-century China, when bamboo tubes ...

before. Pistols and

submachine gun A submachine gun (SMG) is a magazine-fed, automatic carbine designed to fire handgun cartridges. The term "submachine gun" was coined by John T. Thompson, the inventor of the Thompson submachine gun, to describe its design concept as an autom ...

s were eliminated from consideration due to the training required to use them effectively. The shotgun was chosen because it provided a very high volume of fire with a high hit probability. The mechanism used was that of a derringer, with four fixed barrels. The linear

hammer A hammer is a tool, most often a hand tool, consisting of a weighted "head" fixed to a long handle that is swung to deliver an impact to a small area of an object. This can be, for example, to drive nails into wood, to shape metal (as w ...

and its integral firing pin rotated within a fixed breechblock behind these barrels. The lock action was driven by a central coil spring around the hammer rotation axis, cocked by the ratchet mechanism that rotated the hammer after each shot. This ratchet mechanism, although only visible when the hammer was stripped and removed, bore some relation to the cylinder of the Webley-Fosbery self-loading revolver or even some retractable ballpoint pens. A similar rotating hammer in a 4-barrel breech was later used by Hillberg in the

COP .357 Derringer The COP .357 is a 4-shot Derringer-type pistol chambered for .357 Magnum. The double-action weapon is about twice as wide, and substantially heavier than the typical .25 automatic pistol, though its relatively compact size and powerful cartridge ...

. Reloading was in the usual derringer fashion, by the barrels tipping forward on a hinge ahead of the breech block. Both Winchester and Colt built prototypes, although the Colt Defender eight-shot design came late in the Vietnam War and was adapted for the civilian law enforcement market. No known samples were ever produced for military use.

References

External links

Winchester's Liberator Shotguns
{{Multiple Barrel Firearms Winchester Repeating Arms Company firearms Multiple-barrel firearms Insurgency weapons Shotguns of the United States Trial and research firearms of the United States

See also

References

External links