Confiscated Homemade Poachers' Guns from Zimbabwe

Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum And I'm here today at Hire Arms a movie firearm supply house in Johannesburg South Africa And we're taking a look at a pair of poaching guns. These are guns that were actually confiscated by the Zimbabwe police from fairly modern African poachers and I thought it'd be really interesting to take a look at what those guys are actually using because if When we take a look up close at these you'll see they have basically zero access to authentic real firearms And so they're manufacturing things like these that look like guns and usually function like guns, but boy are they horrifyingly scary to think about putting your face next to when you fire so These are all relatively primitive systems some of them like this one are percussion guns I believe they're probably still Flint type guns out there. And this one's actually a paper cartridge gun. This is designed for shotgun shells and it has they're a bunch of huge variety in these because they're all individually custom-made and What's interesting to me is one of the biggest problems with this is okay We can get some scrap metal put together some sort of mostly fun functioning firearm But you can't find scrap gun powder. So where do these guys come up with propellants? and there are a couple potential sources one is Grinding up match heads, which is quite dangerous That's an easy way to blow up a firearm and another The really interesting one that I heard about was actually stealing safety fuse from mining operations So a lot of these guys will work intermittently in mines you know in areas of Southern Africa and they would steal everyday just a little bit of safety fuse and safety fuse is a very slow burning fuse you would if you were doing a Detonating some explosives in the mine. You would use first a chunk of safety fuse which burns slowly Gives you enough time to get to a safe distance and then it would go to a faster acting fuse Etc well the other fuses aren't important the safety fuse is basically very finely ground black powder wrapped in string and bitumen a rubber asphalt sort of material and what these guys would do is they'd steal a little bit every day and then cut it open and Salvage the very fine black powder out of it and you got very little every time but if you did this for a while you could accumulate an actual supply of Legitimate black powder and that's what they would typically use to actually make ammunition for these guns. So this one's a breech loader This one's a muzzle loader. Let's go ahead and take a closer look at them because they're just totally weird and cool So here's an example of a percussion Totally homemade gun all of this is replica So the lock plate's not original the hammer's not actually made by a gun factory. None of this is this is all Put together You can actually cock it there you know, look at all the pieces of this are just handmade and Whoever made this one decided that they wanted to go all super tactical on it With not one but two pistol grips and you know what? It's actually not uncomfortable to hold Although I'd be terrified to actually fire it I think Another neat element of this particular one is there is a it's not really a recoil pad it's just a butt plate on the gun hammered in place with some tacks and this is actually a piece of Mine conveyor belt so you can see it. It's rubber there, but it's actually got Cloth reinforcing or some sort of fiber reinforcing in it, because what was a conveyer belt so a neat use of reclaimed materials Look at the barrel, you can see that this isn't even a piece of tube This is I don't know what this started as but it's clearly hammered into shape It's a brass crude brass front band This is a muzzle loader. So it's got a ramrod underneath it and the front sight there is missing But it does actually fire I know you're not supposed to fire it, you know dry fire percussion guns for fear of damaging them But I'm not particularly worried about damaging this one That number on there, by the way is not a serial number that is a police confiscation number and Since we're here, there's the original rear sight which it's kind of shaped like a front sight Now this one instead of having tactical front grips was made with a folding bipod sort of monopod triangular pod so this one is actually designed to take shotgun shells and What you do is there's a safety cover here you would open it and then you have to cock the action, which is quite stiff There we go So that's cocked now note there is even a safety notch here and pull this back and lift it up at any rate you would then take your shell put it in and push it into the chamber when you fire and this shotgun shell Probably, you know, I think that'll fire a standard primer when you fire this whole thing is gonna slam forward Like that that fires the shell oh I should say you don't fire it until you've got this thing closed and latched Latched over when you fire it. This is actually kinda gonna work a little bit like a recoilless rifle in that This isn't a locked breech by any means. You've got a spring in this rod holding the shell in place It'll vent some gas around Because this is on a really stiff spring that will absorb a little bit of the energy coming back And kind of like a recoilless rifle some of the energy gets vented backwards Which is what prevents it from actually exploding when you fire and then this cover including a little rubber piece there Prevents shrapnel or gas leakage from actually coming out and injuring you hopefully The barrel on this one is clearly made from a piece of pipe crude stock the front sight's not really a Front sight it's kind of a tab on the barrel and the barrel is actually kind of pointed upwards relative to the stock. So a aiming this is trial and error and then just you know a piece of twisted wire connecting the trigger guard to the rear band all sorts of interesting creative work on this Now looking at safety for a moment. You kind of have to imagine that these things are often going to work So if they don't work at all nobody's gonna keep making them and trying to use them However, they absolutely do fail from time to time and someone had a really bad day with this one That thing is thoroughly blown open Now exactly what caused this is who knows anyone's guess That could have been too much powder It could have been someone got their hands on some actual smokeless powder and used it like black powder could be ground-up match heads any number of things that could result in that but That gun is thoroughly unusable Thank you guys for watching. Hopefully you enjoyed the video. It's funny over here in South Africa These things are rightfully all considered completely useless garbage But to me, they're really interesting this is the sort of thing that we don't see in the United States because who on earth would import this it literally has a commercial value of nothing but it's interesting to look at the construction, the fabrication, the use, the wear, and Gives you some idea of what's actually going on with the guys who are using these anyway big thank you to Hire Arms for letting me take a look at a couple of these pieces of complete and very interesting garbage in their gun collection and Stay tuned for more Forgotten Weapons tomorrow.

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 2,542,462

Rating: 4.9513345 out of 5

Keywords: poacher, poaching, gun, homemade, muzzleloader, percussion, flintlock, shotgun, rifle, bipod, police, confiscate, arrest, zimbabwe, south africa, design, history, mine, development, disassembly, mccollum, forgotten weapons, crude, craft, craft built, improvised

Id: ZQG1bHugZRA

Length: 8min 4sec (484 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 17 2018

Reddit Comments

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