20 of the Stupidest Gun Features Ever Patented in America

📖 Get The Old Gun Hand, fifty years at the gunsmith's bench, written down: https://ivansjournal.com A man in Vermont once got a United States patent for a gun you wear on your head and fire by blowing into a rubber tube. It is real. It is on file. And it is not even the dumbest idea in this video. I have spent more evenings than I would like to admit reading old patent drawings and auction catalogs. The paperwork is usually funnier than the gun, and every so often it is a lot sadder. So nobody writes in about it, here are the rules. Every entry is American, meaning an American patent or an American production gun. The famous European oddities like the Apache revolver and the German belt-buckle pistol stayed off. And stupid does not always mean worthless. One of these armed the United States Navy. One ended up in nearly every law school in America. One fires rockets. The entry that changed my mind was the LeMat. Nine shots plus a shotgun barrel on a percussion revolver, big and heavy and complicated, and I was ready to laugh at it. Then I read who carried them. It was not a joke gun. It was an overbuilt answer to the real problem of reloading slowly under stress, and it has held up better than most guns from the same years. After that I stopped asking which ideas were silly and started asking which ones were pointed in the right direction. What we go through: The Allen and Thurber pepperbox, and the Mark Twain line that stuck to it for 150 years The Elgin cutlass pistol, a knife that also shot, and why the Navy bought 150 of them Reid's "My Friend" knuckleduster and the Remington cane gun The Zig-Zag derringer with a ring for a trigger The Maynard tape primer the Army adopted, and what damp weather did to it The Protector palm pistol and the Shattuck Unique, with Oscar Mossberg's name on the patent The Colt 1855 revolving rifle and the gas that came back toward your forward hand The LeMat grapeshot revolver Albert Pratt's 1916 helmet gun, fired without the hands, the feet, or the eyes The Dardick tround revolver and its plastic triangle cartridges The Colt All American 2000, a great name that could not save it The Remington 700 EtronX with a nine-volt battery in the stock The Armatix iP1 smart gun and the New Jersey law behind the backlash The Smith and Wesson internal lock, and the 2025 walk-back after 24 years The 1882 patented trap gun and Katko v. Briney The MB Associates Gyrojet, a rocket pistol weakest right at the muzzle Walter Hunt's Volition Repeater and the rocket ball, and the road to the Henry and the Winchester Said plainly on safety: a trap gun is not self-defense. It cannot tell a burglar from a firefighter, a lost kid, or your own family coming home early, most states ban spring guns outright, and it still costs people everything. A firearm disguised as something else, like a cane gun, can fall into a special federal category under the National Firearms Act, so if you inherit one, talk to someone who knows the classification before you do anything with it. And if the lock in your revolver worries you, leave it disengaged, function-check the gun, and let a qualified gunsmith handle anything beyond that. Stupid made money on this list. Just not always for the people who built it. A failed rocket pistol now sells for thousands, and a bullet everybody laughed at became the ancestor of the Winchester. Reading these patents is part of why I wrote down what decades of guns taught me. The mistakes, the surprises, the ones I regret selling. It is all in my book at ivansjournal.com Tonight, if you own a Smith and Wesson revolver made after 2001, look just above the cylinder release. See that little round hole? Now you know the story. Tell me in the comments which American patent I missed. And tell me this: which gun on this list do you secretly want in your safe? Mine is the LeMat, even knowing exactly how heavy and ridiculous it is. #GunHistory #Firearms #WeirdGuns #GunPatents #AmericanHistory #Gyrojet #LeMat #HelmetGun #SmithAndWesson #Winchester #Mossberg #Remington #Colt #AntiqueGuns #GunCollecting