Winchester's Liberator Shotguns

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons calm I mean I am here today at the Cody Firearms Museum in the Buffalo Bill Center of the West and today we are taking a look at a number of these shotguns that they have in their collection specifically Liberator shotguns this is a pretty unusual they're actually fairly simple they just look really kind of outlandish and sci-fi looking what we have here is a four-barrel basically a shotgun derringer multi-barrel derringer these guns were the brainchild of a guy named Robert Hill burg who is one of the us's less recognized firearms designers definitely deserves more recognition than he actually gets he was born in 1917 he actually just died a few years ago in nineteen twenty twelve and over the course of his career he did a whole bunch of different stuff the notable highlights would be his time as director of R&D for high standard he was also responsible for the four barrel cop derringer which maybe isn't the most the greatest gun ever to be known for although it has a lot to do with these he also designed the whitney wolverine 22 automatic very cool gun and what else he was involved oh the wild ii gas operated 45 caliber Magnum automatic pistol was also his design so the guy knew what he was doing and in 1962 he came up with this idea for this The Liberator shotgun the concept actually this is a wooden mock-up that they have here of the original concept the idea was a four barrel 16 gauge or actually the very first ones were 20 gauge shotgun with a single trigger and in fact these these first ones were fed with a single packet of ammunition for rounds that we drop in and it was supposed to be a very cheap basically like The Liberator pistol from World War two something you can make in large quantities drop to places behind enemy lines so to speak it was intended for counterinsurgency type roles the two places that really come to mind for the original development of the Liberator were Vietnam and Cuba so Hilbert kind of marketed this idea around Winchester was interested and DARPA the Defense Advanced Research Research Projects Agency actually kind of pushed this idea they they promoted it they suggested that maybe this would be a good thing to work on so the concept when Winchester got their hands on it was a gun like this could be made for about 20 bucks it would all be made of castings and very simple to use you can see on this wooden mock-up that it has a big squeeze lever trigger rudimentary sights they did some testing with the early guns and found that at 30 yards you could get three to five buckshot pellets on a human sized target without really regularly without much trouble without much expertise so this was a way to arm a large number of people for a very low cost and the design evolved so why don't we bring the camera in and closer let's start with the wooden mock-up which is a mark one and we'll take a look into mark two and we'll take a look at some mark 3s and see where this project went so this is the closest thing that I have available to an existing mark 1 Liberator this is a wooden mock-up it's a hundred percent scale kind of gives you the idea of what was intended really the the most notable feature of the mark 1 was that it used a proprietary ammo packet sort of thing the idea was to have four shells you can see that this is a diamond-shaped cluster of barrels and they had a single packet of four rounds of ammunition that you would put in I think the idea was you would put it in on this side you then had four shots and then you would eject the thing as a single unit somehow one of these is a would have been a button to eject the ammunition when Winchester started working on the development of the Liberator they decided that there were too many problems with that trying to manufacture the ammunition so that all four rounds were properly aligned with the barrels that was a problem the ammo was heavy and cumbersome in these four round packets in it it just wasn't wasn't working well so one of the things that they changed was that now this was also designed to be made all of castings which you can't quite see that on a wood mock-up but from the shape you can sort of get that idea it was modern casting technology in the early 60s that was going to allow this to be a very affordable weapon for Winchester to make they estimated cost on these to be at about 20 bucks apiece so when Winchester really got going they actually produced not the mark 1 but the mark 2 and here we have an example of a mark 2 Liberator now this is made of all castings it's a four barrel cluster like that the casting itself is made of magnesium there are a number of steel inserts mostly notably in the barrels to give them the extra strength necessary for you know withstanding firing pressure this comes with a collapsing shoulder stock which is probably the least comfortable stock ever envisioned by humankind and that has a button right here on the side I can push that in and remove the stock very much like a grease gun stock and then for storage it actually sits on the front it slides into another pair of recesses right there we have a similar button right here on this side push that down I can lock the stock in place there on the front so does actually stow nicely out of the way we still have this big squeeze trigger and there is a rotating piece inside that fires each of the four barrels in sequence this is held shut by a large latch so there's what the inside looks like there is a round extractor here and that's just spring-loaded just like so so it compresses down when you close the gun when you open the gun it pulls the cases out slightly and then you would have to dump them out load four new cartridges in locking lugs up here your steel locking bar they're actually similar to a Webley pistol their front and rear grip not a whole lot to be said about this thing really it's got a very simple sight up there really intended more for firing from the hip than firing aimed one other feature here it has this trigger guard but if you happen to be wearing heavy gloves or it's cold that simply rotates up out of the way there's a spring-loaded plunger right up here that puts a little bit of pressure on it so that it snaps into place and kind of stays there whether it's up for down now problems with this gun when Winchester tried to start putting these into serious production they did run into a couple of issues probably the most significant of them being they had a hard time getting all the barrels properly lined up and regulated setting the steel inserts in fact if we closed get a close-up on this you can see you can see the steel insert inside the casting they're getting those all set in the proper orientation and held in place while you then cover this whole thing with molten magnesium and cast the final shape that was problematic and it turned out they're having trouble getting them in it as low of a cost as they really wanted now they had also gone to standard ammunition in theory according to everything you see written these mark two guns were in 16 gauge something a little bit less powerful in 12 because this is not necessarily a pleasant gun to shoot however when I actually measure the bore of this I got a point approximately 0.68 inch which is kind of in line for 14 gauge I haven't found any original documentation on these I can't say for sure exactly what the purpose was my suspicion is kind of that this isn't the strongest lock-up ever done and they may have wanted to make sure that people didn't try and stuff Magnum type ammunition into the the chambers and blow the gun open and decided to make their own proprietary slightly smaller than 12-gauge cartridge in order to do that but like I said I can't prove it it's just a supposition on my part now because of the issues with the manufacturer when they they eventually actually moved on to a mark 3 which was a little bit easier to make now we actually have two different examples of the mark 3 here that are differentiated primarily by their opening mechanism but the main change here they kept a casting for the back half of the gun but they changed the lock up method and more significantly they changed the barrels the barrels are now four simple steel tubes that are held together by a stamped plate at the front this was much easier for them to fabricate on existing tooling at a relatively low cost worked a lot better for them than casting the whole barrel assembly so that was replaced now according again to the literature the mark 3 guns in an effort to broaden their appeal to potential police or paramilitary buyers they change these to 12-gauge again according to the literature the idea in theory was that 12-gauge ammo is actually much more available all sorts of different types of normal and specialty ammunition could be acquired for them so however on the three examples that we have here of mark three guns all three of them Mike out at the same bore diameter approximately 0.68 inch so I can't explain it unfortunately I don't have any 12 or 16 gauge snap caps here to test the chambers but it appears to me that they are in fact not 12-gauge they're a slightly smaller proprietary shotgun size now a couple other things let's take a closer look at this guy so to open this up we're going to push the lever down and then pop that open this has a much stronger extractor this would probably function as an ejector I suspect these shells would come zinging out when you open that up now breaking open the action like this doesn't do anything else except eject the shells that are in there this is not like a typical double-barrel gun where you've got two hammers that are cocked when you open the gun instead this is kind of functions like a double action revolver now this separate model this is still a mark three differs a bit in the instead of having the brake lever on the side this has a big tab on the top for opening I have no idea which came first honestly I'm not sure which was standardized this gun is marked B the other one was numbered 18 they never made all that many of these because they never managed to get any actual military contracts however I can show you the firing mechanism in the back so what you're seeing in there is a cloverleaf cluster of four firing pins those are all kind of angles and each one of those firing pins goes out to one of the firing chambers one of the the barrels now the hammer you can see has a protrusion on it right there the face of the hammer actually has this four position ratcheting well hammer really so that every time you fire the gun recaulk it now we're on the top right barrel it's that firing pin rikako now it's on the top left barrel drop it fire that one open it back up now it's on the bottom left barrel and so on so the gun fires progressively it doesn't matter what position that firing pin is in when you first load the gun or first fire it it will simply travel around the the cluster of barrels and fire each one of them in sequence now because you can see in there you could in theory choose which barrel you want to fire you could hand cycling like I was doing or if you really have the memory for it you could try and make sure that you had it set to a specific chamber and load the four chambers with different types of ammunition I don't think that would be practical I don't think it was really intended but in theory you could do it the intention of this gun was to load all four with the same type of ammo and blast it without needing a whole lot of training and see the sights for this are pretty huge and not not exactly precision sights even by shotgun standards so here's our final example of the mark 3 this one as it says right there on the side is a test gun same basic layout now they've changed the locking latch again to be this push down tab the rest of the gun is pretty much the same though it does have this interesting kind of ivory colored plastic front grip today this would have been 3d printed this looks like it was carved out of a block of some sort of plastic instead the trigger the trigger guard is gone has been replaced with a two finger trigger not sure exactly what they were trying to test on this one but it may have been that among other things now at this point when they got to the mark 3 the the military contracts weren't really forthcoming nothing had been gotten there Winchester wanted to try and expand this to police contracts they actually put out some advertising which you can still find reproduced today and they talked about this being you know kind of a gun good for anything this could be a pilot survival gun this could be a well ground just a survivalists kind of survival gun this could be used for prison guards it could be used for paramilitary forces could be used for counterinsurgency like the original intent really they were kind of just shot gunning it so to speak and and trying to appeal to absolutely anything that might work with a gun like this they advertised ammunition made for these now weather like I said these all seem to be non-standard sized bores so whether that's a weird artifact of these pre-production guns which it might be or if they were making literal specialty ammo what you do see in the advertisements are buckshot slug tear gas rounds flare rounds and incendiary rounds were all offered whether they were ever sold I don't know probably not certainly not in any significant quantity obviously these are all NFA guns the barrel length on these is thirteen and a half inches including the chamber back here so they were not marketing them to civilians but they were trying to market them to every conceivable sort of official agency it was 1965 when these mark three guns were being made and advertised and they didn't last a whole lot longer than that without any orders in Winchester dropped this project and that was the end of it for the Winchester Liberator so after Winchester gave up and threw in the towel on this project Hilbert continued to shop it around and he ended up taking the idea to Colt and Colt developed it briefly under the name of the defender and what they came up with was actually an 8 barrel gun in 20 gauge and they were also similarly unable to find any any actual interest in purchasing the gun so they built one example maybe a couple examples certainly not very many and then they scrapped the idea as well and ultimately what we're left with was a few of the colt fenders a small handful of Winchester liberators and not a whole lot else no I hope you enjoyed the video thank you for watching I would like to thank the Cody firearms museum for giving me the opportunity to take a look at these very cool examples and if you ever have the opportunity I would highly recommend coming up here to Cody checking out the firearms museum it is one of the best in the country if not the world thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 1,961,162

Rating: 4.9437532 out of 5

Keywords: hudson, hillberg, wolverine, liberator, defender, 12ga, 14ga, 16ga, mki, mkii, mkiii, mk1, mk2, mk3, winchester, colt, vietnam, cuba, castro, bay of pigs, cia, clandestine, experiment, experimental, prototype, mockup, shotgun, break action, 4-barrel, quad-barrel, robert hillberg, covert, trial, trials, forgotten, history, cody museum, museum

Id: PQK9JNsrq_8

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 03 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/thechapattack]

Gun Jesus is one of my favorite YouTube personalities. Seriously Ian knows his shit and it’s always great learning the really cool history behind these weapons

[u/nza89]

Goddamn I've been blitzing these videos for about a month. Such a delightful guy.

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TF2

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