Striker 12: Shotgun Turned "Destructive Device"

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons calm I'm Ian McCallum and I'm here today at the Murphy auction company taking a look at a little baby striker 12 shotgun now we're gonna go through a couple of different things here today first we're gonna talk about where this came from what the history is then we're gonna talk about how it actually works and then we're gonna come back and talk about what is the legal status of this thing in the United States and why because it is one of a couple weird specific exemptions under US law so to start with its history this was originally designed by a guy named Hilton Walker in Rhodesia although by the time he was actually building them he had emigrated to South Africa so if he came up with the idea in the late 70s by the early 80s he was getting into the process of putting him into production this was introduced the Stryker 12 in 1983 in South Africa now he didn't do this on his own as is typical for this sort of work Hilton Walker was the brains guy the technical guy who came up with the idea he then found a guy named Hoffman who owned armed cell company called armed cell to finance the project and then they found a third company called Asare meymaneh factoring to actually build the things so that was the the basic overview of that the idea that Walker had come up with was basically a high-capacity 12-gauge shotgun if you want to have say 12 rounds of shotgun ammunition in a traditional typical tube magazine shotgun it's gonna have a barrel about five feet long however if you instead use a rotary drum you can have 12 rounds in this much more compact package now it's a little awkward because it's very wide but still way more compact than your than a tube-fed version of the same thing so that was kind of the core and then in order to cycle the thing you didn't want to have it operate like a traditional revolver where pulling the trigger is what physically turns the cylinder because the cylinder on this is just too big and bulky even though it's only made of aluminum not steel still that would give you a terrible trigger pull so instead he got the idea to give it a wind-up like a clock spring so you load the thing and then you crank it wind it up and then when you pull the trigger instead of having to physic turn the drum all it has to do is open up a latch to allow the spring to rotate the drum by itself one position every time you pull the trigger so you basically have a double action revolver style of trigger pull you have a 12 round capacity you can fire the first 12 rounds very quickly but then you've got a little bit of a long reloading process now to help reduce the reloading time he gave this an auto ejecting feature so it will actually kick out 11 of the 12 fired cases the way that works is pretty simple it's just a little bit of gas tapped off of the barrel and vented into the chamber that previously fired so when you fire the first round nothing ejects and the cylinder rotates one position and now you have an empty chamber or an empty round in the chamber that's right next to this ejection port when you fire round number two some of the gas is vented in to chamber number one and that ejects empty case number one this continues through until by the time you fire the last cartridge you have no empty case remaining and so the last cartridge stays in the chamber and you use this manual ejecting rod to punch it out you then still have a fairly lengthy reloading process because you have to go through and yeah I'll show you this in a moment you have to go through and manually load each chamber one at a time kind of like a gate loading revolver and then wind the thing back up but once you do relatively fast to use now he intended this for the security and law enforcement market and there are a number of other benefits that came from having this design most notably it didn't matter what kind of power the different cartridges had if you want a self-loading a semi-automatic shotgun they're always they're often a little finicky about exactly what ammunition if you want to have say full power buckshot because you're the police but you also want to be able to shoot say less lethal rubber slugs or beanbag rounds because you're the police those two are not necessarily gonna both operate the gun equally well your beanbag rounds are probably gonna be underpowered and not cycle a semi-auto shotgun well well there's nothing to cycle here the auto ejecting feature is requires just a tiny bit of of energy compared to a proper semi-automatic action so you can load this with what you could load this with blanks and it would run just fine so that's a nice benefit for the law-enforcement market although of course he was also interested in civilian sales and the problem that he ran into with the first version of this gun was that the South African Police decided to regulate it as if it were semi-automatic I think they saw it as it fires every time you pull the trigger it ejects the empty cases pretty obvious that's a semi-automatic shotgun and that made it difficult for him to market to sell more heavily regulated so in the late 1980s he went through the process of coming up with an idea of the gun that retained all the features he liked but would be regulated as a manually operated shotgun which would make it a lot easier to sell he came up with that in like 89 90 1991 the company formally introduced it onto the market they called it the protecta instead of the striker and what he did was he got rid of the clock spring and instead built a ratcheting sort of mechanism into the barrel shroud and front grip so after you fired a shot you would take the front grip and you twist it about 20 degrees off to the side and that would manually index the cylinder that was enough for the south african police to read desert well not to redesign it but to classify that weapon as a manually operated shotgun which made it a lot easier for him to sell of course better easier to sell may not have worked out as well as he hoped in total they only made six or seven hundred of these in South Africa however they were also exported to the United States as well as a variety of other countries now here in the US we didn't really have liked manually operated shotguns and semi-auto shotguns were treated the same so they didn't bother to go with the protecto with that manually operated click-clack sort of front grip mechanism instead the US market was much more interested in the windup version and that's what came here brought in by a company called Sentinel Arms and that's what we have right here so let's take a closer look at this and I'll show you how it works all right first off a couple of markings we have Sentinel arms corporation Ridgeway Pennsylvania there on the front strap it is designated a striker 12 in little tiny text right on the side of the barrel in much bigger text they have all of this warning stuff printed onto the rear of the frame now this one is actually set up to have a little laser mounted on it if you didn't have that you would have a trough here to use in conjunction with this front blade sight of course this one doesn't have a shoulder stock so the sights are kind of a afterthought anyway there are a number of controls on this to use first off we have a cross bolt safety here so that's safe that is fire and this has a very kind of clunky feeling unusual sort of trigger because every time you pull the trigger it's going to fire around and then the whole cylinder goes chunk one position we have this button on the back and what this does is cycle the cylinder one position without engaging the firing pin so this is what you would use for loading the gun and it's getting sluggish yeah and it's it's totally out of juice so switch around to the front where we have this winding I can wine and wind that up about two and a half turns that will now give it plenty of spring tension to cycle through a couple times so the loading process is you put a shell in click it one position put a shell in you repeat this process until the thing is fully loaded with 12 rounds you do have the witness holes for like ten of the positions you then flip that up that's just a little gate that prevents the last shell you put in from falling out should you lift the gun muzzle up the first time that the action cycles that gate is dropped down because as soon as the action cycles it's going to vent gas into this chamber and eject whatever empty cartridge is in there or if there's no cartridge in there nothing will happen this plastic box is here to catch the ejected shell so it kind of comes kachunk back into here and then just falls out when you get to the last round that you fired use the manual ejector reject ur rod to pull that one out then you can load the thing up and rewind it alright now the legal status of these things is a little bit weird in 1994 these guns the striker twelves as well as the Cobra street sweeper and the Daewoo u SAS 12 were all designated by the Secretary of the Treasury as being destructive devices that subjected them to regulation under the National Firearms Act you have to pay a two hundred dollar tax and go through an elaborate background check to transfer possession of one of these guns how did that happen well the way the the way US law is written all firearms over 1/2 inch of board diameter are considered destructive devices except for shotguns and guns suitable for sporting purposes now as a general rule this was never really exploited as a way to restrict ownership of shotguns all shotguns just got exempted if it fired a 12-gauge shell it's not a destructive device that was just kind of standard policy well in the early 90s there were groups that were lobbying for change to some of these the interpretation of these regulations and they saw drum fed shotguns like the street sweeper and the striker probably in part because of its dumb sounding scary sounding name for the street sweeper people found these particularly frightening looking guns and so they petitioned to have the administration the executive redesignate them as destructive devices because as it actually turns out it's up to executive authority to make that decision so the secretary of the Treasury in 1994 looked at it and came to the conclusion that guns like this specifically this the street sweeper and the u s-- s12 were not suitable for sporting purposes and thus redesignate to them as destructive devices because they have barrels over a half inch diameter now people often wonder why these guns and not other high-capacity drum fed shotguns that are available today like the Saiga 12 the answer is simply that gun wasn't there at the time nobody was asking the government to ban that one it wasn't on the list didn't get banned these did so today these are legally considered destructive devices and they have to go through basically the same transfer process as machine guns or silencers or short-barreled rifles this does add an interesting twist when these were brought in the standard version had an 18-inch barrel and a folding shoulder stock so that it wouldn't be considered a short rail shotgun and subject to the NFA well once it becomes a destructive device the barrel length is no longer legally relevant and so the barrel length can be made anything that people want and that's why this these were initially marketed just to law enforcement because otherwise they would have been considered short-barreled shotguns and the the NFA process is a hassle and so there wasn't much potential for private sale of them today this and the long barrel version are both treated exactly the same and by the way if you're wondering why on earth law enforcement would want this this is actually fairly practical breaching guns because it's compact holds plenty of ammunition if you consider if you're going to breach a door you might need only one round but maybe there's multiple hinges maybe there's a second door inside the building that you're gonna have to breach as well having 12 rounds available to do that means you can probably go through whatever your mission is without having to reload the thing so for all of its association with Cobre and stupidness there are some legitimate practical applications to this guy so hopefully you guys enjoyed this look at what is kind of a weird oddball outliers sort of sort of shotgun in today's market I think they have a pretty cool history and well if you're interested in this one you can find out a bit more about it by taking a look at Murphy's catalog there are of course always a tremendous number of very interesting firearms there that you can check out hopefully you enjoy the video thanks for watching you

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 1,014,094

Rating: 4.9535489 out of 5

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, striker 12, streetsweeper, shotgun, 12ga, armsel, semiauto, drum, saiga, usas 12, cobray, penn arms, south africa, rhodesian, rhodesia, destructive device, class 3, nfa, dd shotgun, pistol, short barreled shotgun, police, law enforcement, breaching, breacher, entry shotgun, sentinel arms

Id: RlR1CI3ck_U

Length: 13min 32sec (812 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 03 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/ThatPieGuy777]

Love ForgottenWeapons, but I was disappointed the striker cant alter reality and allow you to move at double speed in real life like the game. Totally unrealistic my immersion has been broken.

[u/[deleted]]

I had never been so attached to a shotgun since DOOM.

[u/NoelSKennedy]

Best gun in the entire series IMO lol. Carry 100 rounds and run fast as frick while also taking up less space than other shotguns.