A Swarm of Angry Bees: The American 180 .22LR Submachine Gun

hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons calm I'm Ian McCallum I'm here today at the James Giulia auction house taking a look at some of the machine guns that they're going to be selling in their upcoming April spring of 2017 auction and today we are taking a look at this fully transferable American 180 now the American 180 is just a really cool fun recreational machine gun largely because it has a high rate of fire and a very small cartridge this is chambered for the 22 long-rifle 22 rimfire cartridge and has magazines of 177 rounds and 275 rounds it fires at about 1,200 rounds per minute so you get basically just this sewing machine buzz of of firing really a lot of fun however interestingly it was originally marketed for law enforcement and didn't was more successful in that than you might expect so the design of this thing dates back to the 1960s with a guy named Richard Castle there Casull who is better known for his 454 casull cartridge which is basically an uploaded version of the 45 colt dick Casull has done a lot of different things in the firearms world he's a very talented skilled designer what he came up with was the Casull 290 which was basically this sort of gun with a 290 round drum but semi-automatic only and it didn't sell very well my understanding is only about 80 of them were made didn't really go anywhere and about 10 years later American Arms Company came up with a full auto version of basically the same gun now this isn't a very complicated gun it's an open bolt full auto submachine gun basically in 22 rimfire so it's not a whole lot of technical stuff going on the magazine's probably the most complicated part and what American Arms did was like I said market at to law enforcement their pitch was basically that 22 rimfire doesn't have a lot of overpenetration problems it doesn't have a lot of range issues it's something that can be safely as much as any gun can be safely fired in enclosed areas cities houses apartments places where you don't want a high-powered round going singing through 12 walls 22 rimfire is one of the safer cartridges to use in that kind of environment however at 1,200 rounds per minute it can still defeat barricades it could defeat body armor because the gun just really doesn't move and if you hammer the same target five or ten times in the same spot even with a low powered cartridge like a 22 yeah we'll still eventually make a hole what is kind of remarkable to me is that more than a few law enforcement agencies actually heard this pitch and liked it Utah in particular American Arms was based in Utah and apparently the Utah correctional system the prison system purchased American 180s they got them with laser sights and that was partly for crowd pacification nothing like a little red dot appearing on your chest to make you reconsider whatever sort of mischief you might be up to but they did use them there is actually one documented confirmed incident of a police officer shooting someone with an American 180 it was in 1974 a two-man patrol was chasing a pair of burglary suspects in a Camaro and one of those guys turned around and fired a handgun out the back window at the police and so the two cops shot back one of them with a shotgun I would presume the driver I think who managed to miss with one shot and then the other guy had an American 180 and fired about 40 rounds at the car which takes all of you know Merope and that's about 40 rounds and the driver died on the scene and the passenger was apprehended alive but with multiple bullet wounds so the concept of the gun that yes it's a low powered cartridge but you have very little recoil very little movement and massive amounts of follow-up firepower to make up for the low impact of any one projectile that actually played out pretty effectively in that scenario at least now American Arms manufactured these from 72 until 1986 and in 1986 we had the Hewes amendment passed which prohibited I should step back for a moment the very first guns were actually made under contract in Austria and because they were made outside of the United States they were actually they had to be dealer samples they couldn't be imported as transferable guns after 1968 however because the marketing was towards law enforcement agencies well law enforcement agencies could import their own or buy machine guns that were made outside the US after 68 so that wasn't a big deal until the company decided that they also wanted to market it on the civilian market at that point they needed to be made in the u.s. so manufacturer came back into the United States they're made by a number of different subcontractors and the quality really apparently does vary fairly substantially some are really good the Austrian ones apparently are excellent some of the stuff made in the u.s. is not so great this one is an american-made gun but it's a pretty nice one anyway they were being made until 86 as of 86 you could no longer register new transferrable machine guns made in the US at that point a lot of the marketing potential dies for this gun because it's way cooler as a machine gun than it is as a semi-auto you have a lot of options for semi-auto 22 this kind of stands out in full auto so at that point two things happened the company was sold to Illinois Arms Company who proceeded to make them as dealer sample guns and apparently also the owners of American Arms got in some legal trouble for trying to file registration paperwork on a bunch of receivers that they hadn't actually manufactured yet was something that happened in 86 when people whose livelihood depended on machine gun manufacturer kind of panicked and started making paper registering non-existing gun that's that is a subject for a much later video at any rate this one not subject to any of those problems this is a very nice transferrable registered everything's cool about it machine gun Illinois Arms Company manufactured these for a few years but really without being able to make them transferable there wasn't much market in it they partnered with a company called E&L manufacturing the whole deal kind of went bust because well they couldn't make one's anymore ENL still to this day in well they ended up with the inventory and the parts and they do service and they made the plastic 275 round drums so there is still actually service there's an a community out there of American 180 owners and shooters because they're really fun little guns now there are a couple things to be aware of the magazines take a while to load because they are huge and they're a little bit tedious to load there's a winder in the center of the magazine we'll take a look at all of that in a minute when we're out on the range it's also important to clean these things regularly the headspace on them is a little bit finicky and if you don't clean the guns regularly like every couple hundred rounds which means like every time you empty a drum you do start to have the risk of out of battery discharges so blow cases out which is not catastrophic it is after all just a 22 rim fire but as long as you're wearing gloves not that big a deal but can be pretty disconcerting so we have a couple of different options with this particular gun we have one of the smaller the nominal 180 it's actually a hundred and seventy seven round metal drum we also have the larger plastic drum and we have two different barrels on it we have a horizontal and a vertical clearly styled after the iconic Thompson gun this comes apart really quick and easy to change the barrels so why don't I go ahead and show you that and then we'll take it out on the range it's a 22 caliber open bolt subcontinent controls on this are very simple trigger safety fire and safe there is no semi-auto option on this it's off or high magazine release is located here on the top of the gun pull this tab back and the drum lifts out it has a little tab in the front right there and the locking tab in the back and then the drum and it's winding unit are separate I'll show you loading in a minute bolt handle is on this side as an open bolt gun it does lock to the rear non reciprocating bolt handle and then when you pull the trigger the bolt is going to drop down and as soon as a chamber is around it's going to fire it you have a number of different options for sights this rail is standard on the gun so you can fit any it's not a Picatinny rail but it's the the standard sort of sporting arms rail you can any type of site you want to it you'll notice on this one someone has stacked a pair of risers and then a little sort of m1 carbine like iron rear sight on there you could also do optics they did originally make a laser sight for this as well here's our front sight on this one a couple of really big rabbit ears they're in a central post this of course is just to make it high enough to match the rear sight because you do have to have it elevated enough to clear the review over the drum disassembly which is Barrel removal is very simple it's just this knurled nut there we take that out what that's doing is actually screwing the barrel into the receiver so once it's loosened like this it is captive and then we can just pop the barrel and the cover plate out you can see the bolt face here it's got an extractor on the bottom and a fixed firing pin on the top remember that this is a rimfire gun so the firing pin is not in the center and that just reciprocates back and forth on a recoil spring that's all there is mechanically to the American 180 there were a couple different styles made here this has a pair of I believe 15 inch barrels they did also make shorter nine-inch barrels and then we also have a horizontal front grip as well as a vertical front grip both pretty much tailored after the Thompson but you know take your pick whichever you prefer both of these are actually included with this gun and then the muzzle is threaded so you can put on a flash hider like there is here or you can put on a suppressor whatever you like if you do want to shoot subsonic ammunition through this it does require changing the recoil spring however because the drum is spring wound you don't have to worry about the power of the cartridge impacting the drums ability to feed so subsonic actually works pretty well as long as you have a light in recoil spring so there is one other mechanical piece here I should point out and that's this cover plate this is actually kind of like a removable feed ramp so the drum itself is going to spit rounds out but it has no feed lips here it's just a flush you know cartridge shaped hole in the bottom of the magazine you need some way to guide cartridges out of this and into the position of the bolt so they feed into the barrel and then get struck and fired and that's what this plate does it has a feed ramp here on the front and then a pair of little spring-loaded guide arms and so the drum is going to sit up here spring pressure from the drum will push around out into this where the bolt pressing forward will catch the base of the round push it down into this feed ramp at the front these little arms guiding it side to side and then into the chamber where it will then be fired so this fits into the gun right like that and then the front of these two little semicircular lugs at the front actually lock into the barrel these lugs right here set into the barrel like that to lock everything in the proper geometry and then of course once you screw the barrel in none of this can come back out until you've removed the barrel lock I want to show you a quick tutorial here on how to actually load the magazines for the American 180 because it's not immediately obvious how to do it and it is take some specific care so this is a plastic mag made by ENL and this is a 275 round mag it has space for 55 cartridges around its circumference and five stacks of cartridges the original metal drums actually had 59 rounds in the circumference and they'd hold three stacks for a total of a hundred and seventy seven rounds that's where the name 180 comes from it was a nominal 180 round capacity but one of the slots one of the sixty round 60 slots in the magazine is a dummy hence you get fifty nine per stack and a total of 177 anyway in order to do this we are first actually going to take the winding mechanism out of the drum on the back you have these two sets of Springs I'm going to pull those apart which is a little bit annoying and there we go pop that down pop that down there we go so this is the winding unit and we're gonna leave this out while we load the Mack now what we want to do is take the magazine and this is where the cartridges are going to feed out and we want to turn this around until this is lined up with our dummy feed slot people all right so I'm going to start at my dummy position and I'm going to move one round clockwise and then on top of this ramp I'm going to put a cartridge in you can see the nose fits in these two slots that the rim of the cartridge fits in between those two and then I can the first one is a little tricky because we're gonna push there's a plate in here which you can't really see there we'll see it later we're pushing that plate up move to the second spot put around in like so and then this is just one round at a time there is a loading tool apparently made which does make this a little bit faster and easier but I don't have one of those and this is the basic way to load these things so basically I'm going to go through and there are this plastic mag 55 slots each one gets a cartridge this is a really time-consuming drum to load now I have loaded the entire first stack of cartridges and you can see I'm back at this dummy position now I think you can kind of see the spring-loaded plate you can certainly see the springs in here that plate when we put the next round in is going to have to jump up there you can see it moving right there so now we do the whole thing over a second time now we're going to be loading the second stack of cartridges you can see as I'm going around we're gonna have a second stack here we're gonna do that all the way around the drum back to the beginning you're gonna repeat this until the drum is fully loaded this is a 275 round drum so this will have a total of five cartridges in each stack once I am all done this as you can tell takes a little while to load now as for functionality the way this works is when you're actually shooting the winder is going to be pushing the drum the opposite direction and this little ramp is going to pick up one round at a time and push it out of the magazine just like that what's important about this is that the winder is powering the drum it doesn't rely on the recoil impulse of a cartridge to actually move this big drum with a 22 caliber rimfire cartridge you wouldn't have enough power to reliably index this drum all by itself so instead you have a winder on the drum speaking of that winder this is it and it's got a safety lever on it it's got an F for fire and an S for safe what we're going to do is first we're gonna go ahead and put this in we're gonna match these two holes with those two holes and if we flip it over get that lined up there there line them up there and then push them through there's that one and that one and these wires hold that in position now the best way to do this next step is to actually load the drum into the gun and wind it while it's on the gun however I don't have the gun here so I'm gonna show you what you do is now you'll want to wind this winder one of the quarter turns for each stack of cartridges if you're doing it off the gun it's important to hold the drum so that the plastic part doesn't rotate or else if you wind this up and then let go of it without engaging the safety the drum will spin around and fountain all of your ammunition out so don't do that we're gonna take this and there are plastic notches ratchet notches on the inside of the drum and that's what's clicking so we're gonna wipe this up well say that's that's enough windings normally you'd want one and a half per stack of cartridges and then I engage this lever that lever is a friction break which prevents the drum from unspooling on you so you engage that then you can safely let go of this you can load it in the gun when you're then ready to fire the first thing you do you've got to obviously you've got to open the bolt you've got to put the gun the guns fire selector on fire and then you also have to disengage the friction brake on the drum which then allows it to spin so if I were to not if I were to just let it go that's what happens all your ammo comes out so don't let that happen to you time to give this a try this thing has absolutely no perceived recoil just pull the trigger and hose something with angry bees of 22 hung rifle well until it malfunctions you normally I'd like to think it's pretty easy to fire single shots on full auto I can't tap off a single round in this I can occasionally get two and usually three you more angry bees I think I might have expended the drum this thing literally just vibrates when you pull the trigger it is the sight picture goes nowhere just making holes you can write your name with this thing this is really cool but if you want a machine gun that is the closest thing you'll ever get to a handheld swarm of angry bees I think the American 180 would be it they just recently hired a lot of fun I don't think well there were some law-enforcement applications touted by the company you really don't need that to justify this thing it's just fun there are still of course parts and support available for these which is nice and a little bit unusual in the civilian machine gun market and if you're interested in owning this one of course it is coming up for sale here and it is fully transferable so take a look in the description text below you'll find a link there to Julia's catalog page on this gun can take a look at their pictures and description and bidding on it is just to click away through their website thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 2,308,752

Rating: 4.9519296 out of 5

Keywords: submachine gun, 22 rimfire, fun machine gun, machine gun shooting, 22 machine gun, american 180, am180, bullet hose, police machine gun, utah prison, drum magazine, 22lr, rimfire submachine gun, law enforcement, new machine guns, law enforcement sales, law enforcement agencies, recreational machine gun, Forgotten Weapons merch, 22 drum, e&l manufacturing, forgotten weapons, inrange, inrangetv, mccollum, history, development, firearm, gun, kasarda

Id: J50N5lQoAFw

Length: 21min 30sec (1290 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 25 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Hal_Nein_Thousand]

Anton adds it to the game but the mags spawn empty and must be manually loaded.

[u/BrotherBaker]

BRRRRRRRRRRT

[u/Cyberchaotic]

monthly bee request i see

[u/darklurk]

We so need more pan magazine guns like this and the Lewis Gun. The DP-28 just feels so lonely!

[u/jetcool8]

This one would be great! Please dont add it to the operator Ori loot table though!