Seven wild, whacky and insane guns

Very nice article from cracked.com, seven interesting and weird firearms.
Could make for some great Steampunk models I think.

Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

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7 Awesomely Insane Guns People Actually Used

By: Adam Wears,  Ben Adelman March 18, 2012

Once we invented the gun, that was pretty much it, right? Sure, all technology advances, new features are added and the design gets tweaked a little over time, but it usually stays more or less the same. Cars always have four wheels, a couple of pedals and some seats, no matter how much we end up fussing with them. So guns consist of one handle, one trigger, one barrel and then the bit that kills people. It's a tube of death; why mess with the concept? Because you're a crazy person, that's why. And that's how we got these:

#7. The Duck's Foot Pistol

David A. Cushman

The duck's foot pistol, so named because its four splayed barrels were shaped like the foot of a duck (back in the 18th century, when ducks were gargantuan, terrifying steampunk monstrosities with pistols for toes), was designed to take on large groups at close range. It was most popular with officers on sailing ships, who often carried a pair of them to, uh, "discourage" potential mutineers in the cramped quarters.

Gunauction.com
Advantage: Skinny guy standing between two fat guys.

The immediately apparent problem here -- that the rational person would've spotted instantly, but the completely insane gun maniac clearly missed because he was too busy firing indiscriminately into crowds -- is that you can never hit what you're actually aiming at with a standard duck's foot pistol. You can only hit everything else around it, because none of the four barrels point straight ahead. But that just means you have to remember to think a little differently when handling one: Instead of aiming at the thing you want to kill, you just aim at the one thing you like and kill the rest of the world around it.

#6. Key Guns

O Object

First used in the 16th century, key guns allowed a jailer to keep his weapon throughout the entire extremely vulnerable process of opening a cell door, thus never leaving him unprotected. Well, all except for the times when he's actually using the key/barrel end of the pistol to disengage the lock. That's right, key guns weren't just shaped like keys to throw people off or disguise their nature as pistols -- they're both functional keys and functional pistols (presumably so that if some uppity lock ever has the balls to stick on your watch, you can just shoot it off like a Renaissance Bruce Willis).

Continued at the link...