Back in the day, we had a regular customer whom we absolutely knew would absolutely buy a specific sort of firearm. Over the years, we got in everything from a SPAS-12 shotgun to a Crossfire pump-action shotgun/rifle combo to a classic ASP conversion on a Smith & Wesson Model 39. Whenever one of these unusual firearms crossed our books, we’d contact this dude because he was all in on weirdo guns. I had his contact info in my Rolodex (remember those?) as “The Weird-Gun Guy.”
His personal tastes just ran to the esoteric. It’s not like there was any sort of organizing principle behind his tastes; he just liked weird guns. But, dudes like that are not the only variety of fans of unusual firearms. True confession time: I used to be a huge fan of the P7 pistol from Heckler & Koch.
I made a lot of hay about how it was because of the low bore axis, or the cool “squeeze-cocking” system whereby the pistol was actually a single-action without a safety when the frontstrap was fully depressed and an inert lump when it wasn’t. The problem with the squeeze-cocking system was that, when issued to police, there were several high-profile incidents where officers had their fingers already on the trigger when something startled them and they spasmodically squeezed the frontstrap. Predictably, the pistol did as it was designed to do and discharged. As a result, law enforcement agencies from New Jersey to West Germany got out of the P7 business, to the chagrin of us fans.
The gas-delayed-blowback operating system was the real reason I loved the P7, though. That made it novel, different—odd. I could extol the virtues of the operating system, like how the fixed barrel made for greater mechanical accuracy and, since it didn’t have to move inside the pistol, a more compact design. There was also the way that bleeding off gas pressure from just in front of the chamber allowed for a recoil-buffering system that self-adjusted for higher-pressure ammunition.
I brushed off the downsides, like the necessity (and difficulty) of cleaning the tunnel in the frame in which the gas piston traveled, and the way that the frame above the trigger guard effectively became a heat sink. Heckler & Koch attempted to mitigate this by adding a plastic heat shield to U.S. market P7M8 and M13 models, but if you run across a masochist who’s still bringing P7s to high-round-count training classes in 2025, you’ll see that they’ll almost always bring two or even three pistols so they can swap out when one becomes literally too hot for them to handle.
There’s a reason why most pistols weren’t using this novel operating system (there have been a handful over the years, from the Steyr GB to the Walther CCP) instead of some variation on the common short-recoil setup, and it’s not because they weren’t brilliant enough to grasp its inherent superiority.
If there were a long-gun equivalent, it’d be any kind of bullpup. Much like fusion has been only 20 years away for the last 50 years, the bullpup was going to be the dominant rifle design of the future since the 1980s and it will be—any day now. Just you wait!
While there have been militaries that adopted bullpups—and they’ve met with limited success—it’s notable that the largest army to adopt one, the French with the FAMAS, is phasing it out in favor of a conventional design that’s an HK-manufactured variant of the AR pattern.
Like the gas delay on the P7, a bullpup design solves one engineering challenge by offering a rifle-length barrel with the attendant advantage in muzzle velocity in a compact package, but it introduces several others that must be engineered around. How do you accommodate both right- and left-handed shooters? How do you engineer a good trigger when the lockwork and the trigger lever itself are in different ZIP codes? Most militaries have decided that bullpups are just too much of a long-engineering run for not enough of a short-performance slide and just stuck with conventional layouts.
In the revolver world, there are three dedicated varieties of the Weird-Gun-Guy Virus.
The first is the revolver that fires shotshells. For a while, it was largely the province of the rarely seen Thunder Five, but now the Taurus Judge has been on the market long enough that everyone who has Shotgun Revolver-itis has been able to get a dose and scratch their itch.
The second is the low-bore-axis variety. Over the years, various Mateba designs and, currently, the Rhino from Chiappa solve the inherent bore-axis problem in most revolver designs by having the wheelgun fire from the bottom chamber in the cylinder.
The thing is, the basic design of the revolver has sorted itself out by means of convergent evolution over the course of nearly two centuries. While a Colt, Ruger, Smith & Wesson or Taurus may have differences in detail, they all now basically operate with a pawl (usually called a “hand”) in the rear of the frame window advancing the cylinder by acting against a ratchet on its backside. The cylinder is locked in place during firing by a stop or bolt protruding through the bottom of the frame window and engaging a mortise or notch in the cylinder.
Revolvers firing from the bottom chamber turn a lot of this on its ear and, again, most companies decided that any minimal benefit in felt-recoil reduction and muzzle flip was not worth the increase in complexity.
The most persistent and widespread version of the Weird-Revolver Virus is the one that crops up on discussion forums any time someone brings up top-break revolvers.
If you really want to get it out of your system, there are a bajillion relatively inexpensive top-breaks out there chambered in .22 LR or .32 and .38 S&W, and you can go out and learn for yourself why manufacturers stampeded to solid-frame double-action revolvers en masse in the final decade of the 19th century. (Hint again: It wasn’t that they didn’t understand how awesome top-breaks are. Trust me.)
Interestingly, there’s a holy grail out there for weird-revolver guys. During the Cold War, the Soviets made a prototype survival weapon for cosmonauts: the TOZ-81. No, it wasn’t to fight aliens or NASA in low-earth orbit, but rather in case they encountered dangerous wildlife upon landing in the far reaches of Siberia. The TOZ-81 is a bullpup top-break revolver that fires .410 shotshells from the bottom chamber. It’s practically a Voltron of every weird-gun-guy obsession. If some western arms manufacturer turned out a reproduction, I’m pretty certain they’d sell dozens of them!
