Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Morphy Auction Company taking a look at a Deer Gun. This is the CIA's successor to the Liberator pistol. So, the whole concept of this was to produce a very, very cheap, very, very simple pistol that could be air dropped to resistance groups and insurgents and anybody that the CIA wanted to
very covertly arm with a pretty lame gun. So really the idea is someone has this and they use it
to shoot an enemy soldier and take that guy's real gun. Now the idea for this came up in the 1950s,
and basically someone got the idea of "Hey you know that Liberator thing, like that really cheap
pistol that's really simple, that we can just drop to people? We could make use of some of those in some of the places
where the CIA's working now. Like can we get some of those?" Well, no, they couldn't. Because pretty
much the entire stockpile of Liberators (of which a million had been made, give or
take, and a tiny faction of that actually used), the vast majority of them were
just scrapped in 1946 and '47. And so by the time the CIA got around to thinking that that
might be kind of a useful thing to have, they were all gone. So, they looked into, well, what would
be involved in doing it again from scratch. And they come up with a completely different design.
So the Liberator had been designed for mass production by GM, who had a lot of experience with stamping,
this was from like their head lamp division I think. And the gun was designed to be cheaply stamped out of a
couple of pieces, you know, two halves, spot weld them together. Well ... another way that you can make really
cheap bulk products, guns or anything else, is casting. And so in the '50s the CIA ended up
going to a guy named Russel Moore who ran a company called
American Machine & Foundry, AMF. He had done a bunch of small arms
sorts work for the CIA, covert, sneaky stuff, and he figured that, yeah, you could make
a cast aluminium, single shot, 9mm pistol and you could make them for,
like, $3.95 a piece, 4 bucks a pop. Not quite as cheap as the Liberator, but hey,
it's a little later, inflation's done some work. A little more expensive, but still a very cheap gun. They went with 9mm because by the 1950s this was a much
more common calibre outside of the United States than .45 ACP. And so this is what they ended up making. Unfortunately this Deer Gun is in pretty poor condition, it's
been used and abused, and it is not functional any more. But I can show you how it originally worked. The idea was you had a compartment
for a couple of cartridges in the grip, very similar to the Liberator in that aspect actually. And then you had a manually
cocked striker, and the barrel threads in. So, the threads on this are a little gunked up
right now, it should thread all the way in like that. But this one doesn't want to go much farther than that. Anyway, you would unscrew the barrel, you
would manually insert a cartridge into the barrel, you would then screw it onto the gun. You would then pull this back (and it's frozen up
unfortunately), you would pull this back, that cocks it, and then your trigger here of course fires it. Now there was one extra little accessory, you
may notice there is a little trough for a sight, just barely, on top of the gun. That's just cast into it. The one extra accessory was a front sight that
clipped onto the barrel, and it was dual purpose, it also served as a safety lock. So you would clip it onto the striker back here, and
it would prevent the striker from actually dropping. ... that way you could carry the gun with a round
in there, so you didn't have to unscrew the thing, go through that whole process, if you wanted to use it. All would you have to do is pull the little
cap off, snap it onto there as a front sight, if you even wanted that, and then that
unlocked the striker and allowed it to fire. There are no markings whatsoever on these guns,
and that's intentional. They aren't even serialised. There is a little bit of grip checkering down here,
and that was built into the aluminium casting So the idea was to make these very,
very simple, a minimal amount of machining. Some of these were made with smoothbore
barrels, and some with rifled barrels. Oh, and I forgot to mention, there
was an ejector rod in the grip, so that gave you something to punch out
an empty case should the case decide to stick. When these were officially put into CIA inventory,
they were given the stock number of 1395-H00-9108. So if we have any archival folks who want to do your own delving
into the gun, good luck, that's the number that you need to use. There is of course one of the classic questions
on something like this is, is it actually worth while? You know, was this a good idea? Well, this thing weighs 12
ounces, it cost the US government $300 in something like 1962. ... Could they have done better than
a 12 ounce single-shot gun for $300? Yes, they absolutely could have, frankly,
they could have got way more effective ... results by dropping basically dropping small
compact Colt or Smith & Wesson revolvers, or revolvers from any other
manufacturer, but I think some of this comes to they want something
deniable and unmarked. OK, fine. And I think part of it also comes down to the insular
nature of some of the intelligence organisations who kind of get an idea and run with it, even though it
may not actually be the most practical thing out there, so. Now these were produced, although never
in actually substantially large number. Moore got a contract from the government to manufacture
1,000 of the guns, for which he was paid $300,000. And if you are good at math you may realise that
that is a little more that $4 a piece, that's $300 a piece. And the reason for this is that this was an
initial contract to set up all of the tooling and a production line, and subsequent
production of the gun would be far cheaper. And that makes sense, he wasn't bilking the
government, that's how this sort of thing works, you pay a lot of money to produce
a casting die, or a casting mould, and then it's very cheap to make a whole lot of
guns out of it, but you need that initial investment. So they put in that initial investment, they made 1,000 of
the guns, and then that was it. There were no further ones. So, many of these have since been destroyed,
but there's not really not any good information on exactly how many survived,
or what they were used for. The CIA has rejected all Freedom Of Information
Act requests asking about uses of the Deer Gun. And so there's a small handful of them that has
snuck out of government property one way or another. And this is one of the very few.
Unfortunately it is in pretty rough condition, but to be honest, this is the first time
that I have even seen a Deer Gun in person. There are very few of them out there, so it's a
very cool thing for anyone who is interested in the history of the Cold War, Vietnam, covert
intelligence agencies, any of that sort of stuff. The Deer Gun is this really cool little artefact. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
If you'd like to see more details on this, or any of the other cool stuff they have here
at Morphys, check out their auction catalogue. You can find that through their web site,
which you'll have to find on your own because YouTube does not allow me to put a link
to it in the description text. So, best of luck with that. Thanks for watching.
But it's not a muzzle loader