The most popular shotgun made by the French Darne company was their 1897 sliding breech side-by-side, which saw sales and use worldwide. Before that, however, Darne invented a rotating breechblock system - first a series of external hammer varieties in the 1880s and then this hammerless Model 189...

It may seem sometimes that I've never met a gun I didn't like...but I can assure you that isn't the case. The Streetsweeper, for example, is a pretty terrible gun.

Originally designed in 1983 by a Rhodesian man named Hilton Walker, the Striker shotgun was refined and manufactured in South Afri...

The Chichester Rifle Company (actually of Jersey City, NJ) was one of many small firms that sold branded guns made by the Hopkins & Allen company. In particular, Chichetser sold a “pocket rifle” which was really an XL No. 5 revolver fitted with a long barrel and detachable shoulder stock. These a...

Colonel Jean Alexandre LeMat was a native Frenchman who emigrated to the United States and in 1856 secured a patent for a "grapeshot revolver", which had both a 9-shot .42 caliber cylinder and a 20-gauge smoothbore barrel acting as the cylinder axis. A moveable striking surface on the hammer allo...

Sylvester Roper is not a well known name in firearms history today, but he made a number of notable contributions to the field - in addition to his work with motorcycles and automobiles where he is much better remembered.

The Roper revolving shotgun was an early cartridge-firing repeating sho...

In 1855, Colt introduced a new revolver unlike the others in their lineup - it was a side-hammer design with the cylinder stops built into the axis pin instead of the cylinder. They then proceeded to scale the design up into revolving rifles and shoguns in several calibers. The revolving shotgun ...

The Becker shotgun is a very unusual blow-forward, revolving cylinder shotgun made in Germany in the 1920s (although it was originally patented in the late 1890s). Only a very small number were made - allegedly as few as 100. The serial number on this one appears to be 755, which could mean more ...

This ludicrously huge handgun is actually a 10-gauge Colt 1855 Revolving Shotgun with a cut-down barrel and a newly made grip frame. The backstop and trigger guard of the shotgun were handily reshaped into a grip frame, and the finished product actually looks nicely proportional - until you try t...

Sylvester Roper was a great example of the classic American inventor - he had a wide range of interests, and affected technological development in more than one industry. This shotgun is a design he patented in 1866, which uses a 4-round magazine of the 12ga shells. It has an unusual mechanism wh...