The Winchester Liberator was a prototype 16-gauge, and later on

12-gauge The gauge (in American English or more commonly referred to as bore in British English) of a firearm is a unit of measurement used to express the inner diameter (bore diameter) and other necessary parameters to define in general a smoothbore barr ...

, four-barreled

shotgun A shotgun (also known as a scattergun, peppergun, 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 discharges numerous small ...

, 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 ...

derringer A derringer or deringer is a small handgun that is neither a revolver, semi-automatic pistol, nor machine pistol. It is not to be confused with mini-revolvers or pocket pistols, although some later derringers were manufactured with the pepp ...

. It was an implementation of the Hillberg Insurgency Weapon design.

Robert Hillberg Robert Hillberg (August 27, 1917 – August 12, 2012) was a firearm designer and the head of Research & Development at the High Standard Manufacturing Company. His designs included the folding shotgun stock, the Whitney Wolverine lightweight pisto ...

, 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 that uses an explosive charge and is designed to be readily carried and operated by an individual. The term is legally defined further in different countries (see legal definitions). The first firearms originate ...

before. Pistols and

submachine gun A submachine gun (SMG) is a magazine (firearms), magazine-fed automatic firearm, 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 descri ...

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 nail (fastener), nails into wood, to sh ...

and its integral

firing pin A firing pin or striker is a part of the firing mechanism of a firearm that impacts the primer in the base of a cartridge and causes it to fire. In firearms terminology, a striker is a particular type of firing pin where a compressed sprin ...

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. 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 ShotgunsArchive
{{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