Shot diverters

[Conelrad]

A few years back I remember seeing LE (now called "tactical") pump guns with a doo-dad welded on the end of the barrel that looks like a figure-8 hole, with the minimum opening about 1/2" high.

Supposedly it forced the cone of fire wider.

I always wondered if it did that, and without causing damage to the gun.

One might need a new gun if you forgot and ran a slug through it.....

DDG

 

[pps]

Are you talking about a duckbill choke?

 

[rcmodel]

That was a child of the late 60's & 70's riots.

Supposedly a riot control officer could shoot at the street in front of an advancing mob and hit a bunch of hippies in the legs wounding a bunch of them, instead of killing just one or two.

It proved totally ineffective, and soon fell by the roadside as another ingenious solution to a non-existent problem when lethal force was deemed too much force for riot control in the USA.

Of course another version of the story is it was invented for the Navy SEAL's for use in jungle fighting in Vietnam??

Who knows for sure now?
But the only recollection I have of them was for riot control.

Rc

 

[Nickel Plated]

Yea, sounds like the duckbill or spreader chokes. When installed it changes the shot pattern from a circular to a flatter horizontal or vertical (depending which way you turn the choke).
From the tests i seen, they seem to work fine, but you can't use slugs, or steel shot through them.

I think their lack of popularity is mostly due to the fact that a horizontal spread is kind of undesirable in most situations. In combat where you have little concern about stray pellets, a horizontal spread is nice for hitting ground targets. no need for a "tall" shot pattern but a wider one would definitely help with hit probability when point shooting.

Problem is shotguns aren't used that often in combat outside of a very few specialized roles.
And police or civilians DO have to worry about stray pellets so they would want a tighter pattern.

Basically, they do what they were designed to quite well. There's just not much of a market for what they were designed to do.

 

[Sunray]

That was a child of the mutinies on His(at the time) Majesty's Royal Navy ships. Duck foot pistols and blunderbuss' with shot spreaders are a lot older than the 20th Century.
"...One might need a new gun if..." New barrel.

 

[PapaG]

I seem to recall Charlie Askins writing about using something like that. Don't know if he shot it at anyone or from front or back. Saw a pic of one that had a rectangular opening also....flared out from the attachment at the muzzle.

 

[Fred Fuller]

Older thread with pictures at http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=418779 ...

 

[kBob]

Actually some of the pole Arms found on the Mary Rose had such muzzles. They were called "Murderers", really. They used cubical stacked shot for most efficient use of space and were for sweeping an enemy deck in the days when ships closed to boarding distance.

I always thought of them as pole mounted Claymore Mines.......get rc to explain Claymore Mines if you don't know what I mean, he will do it with less spelling errors and imaginative grammer than me.

-kBob