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In 1939, Adolf Hitler commissioned the Friedrich Krupp A.G. company of Essen, Germany to build a gun that would breach the French Maginot line. They responded with the “Gustav Gun,” the largest gun ever built.
Named after the head of the Krupp family, Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, the Gustav Gun weighed in at a massive 1344 tons, so heavy that even though it was attached to a rail car, it still had to be disassembled before moving so as to not destroy the twin set of tracks as it passed over. This 4-story behemoth stood 20 feet wide and 140 feet long. Its 500 man crew, commanded by a Major-General (that’s two stars), needed nearly three full days (54 hours, to be exact) to set it up and prep for firing. But when it did fire, whoowhee, hold on to your hat.
The description of this gun’s destructiveness is at Gizmodo. Link -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: American Rifleman, February 1998)
Pig Popper – $9.95
Do you ever feel like hurdling something soft at one of your co-workers? Now you can! The Pig Popper from the NeatoShop, stress relief never felt so fun.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more piggy fun!
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Got a license for that toy gun? That’s right – if this new law is passed, all items that look like a gun will have to be licensed:
ANY ITEM that looks like a gun will have to be licensed under several changes to the Weapons Act being considered by the Queensland State Government.
Even guns made out of materials as unlikely as soap or plastic may have to be kept under lock and key if they could "reasonably be taken to be a weapon".
The draft act says an imitation is a "reasonable copy" of a weapon that is not capable of causing death or injury.
"If it looks like a gun and feels like a gun, it will have to be licensed," said a government source.
"We just want to know where they are."
Link (Photo: Mark Cranitch)
Ice Cream Cone Fan – $7.95
Hot enough for you? Beat the heat with this super cool ice cream cone fan from the NeatoShop. Guaranteed not to melt in your hand: Link
Gun Fan – $4.95
Ice cream fan not your thing? Perhaps a macho gun fan would be more to your liking! Just don’t bring that one to the airport, mmkay?
You can’t blame Raymond Lewis Shepard for looking so glum on his mugshot. See, his would-be victim, a 69-year-old woman, turned the table on him when he dropped his handgun on her lap:
About 7 p.m. Friday, Carol J. Costello had just left the Walmart on Beville Road when a black Chevrolet Impala pulled in front and forced her to stop. A passenger armed with a silver semiautomatic handgun wrapped in a towel jumped out and tried to break the driver’s-side window with the gun, police said.
When that didn’t work, he leaped onto the hood and smashed a large hole in the windshield.
That’s when the suspect’s handgun fell through the hole and into Costello’s lap. She grabbed the gun and aimed it at the suspect, who fled to the Impala.
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Lobbyists in Texas are signing up for concealed handgun permits by droves. Why? It’s not that they all want to pack heat when coming to lobby in the Lone Star state Capitol, rather, they found a loophole to skip the long lines at the metal detector:
To avoid getting delayed behind noisy schoolkids waiting in line to pass through new metal detectors at the state Capitol, lobbyists are signing up for concealed handgun permits exempting them from the security checkpoints. [...]
The only people exempted are lawmakers, properly identified state employees or Texans who carry a pistol with a concealed handgun license — or just the license itself, which allows them to bypass the security lines for an express lane reserved for “CHL: Holders.”
“Every lobbyist in Texas is going to become a card-carrying member or a gun-carrying member,” lobbyist and former state lawmaker Pat Haggerty said. “We’re going to have more damn guns in here than we know what to do with.
“And there are some lobbyists I don’t know whether I’d trust — or trust myself if they’re around,” added Haggerty, a Republican who represented El Paso for 20 years. “It would certainly be a good way to do away with the competition.”
There’s method to this madness, folks: metal detectors are there to detect guns being furtively smuggled into the State Capitol building. You can openly carry concealed firearms if you take an all-day training class for certification to do so.
Can your kid get into trouble for playing with a two-inch LEGO gun at school? Here’s a story that illustrates why we should have zero tolerance for inane "zero tolerance policies":
Patrick Timoney, a 9-year-old student at PS 52 in Staten Island, N.Y., was in the school cafeteria Tuesday playing with LEGOs when he was taken to the principal’s office and threatened with suspension. One of his toys was a LEGO policeman that holds a 2-inch plastic gun. The school has a no-tolerance policy when it comes to toy guns. [...]
The boy’s mother, Laura Timoney, 44, was fuming over the issue.
“You don’t traumatize a child who loved to go to school, who wanted to be early every day to school, you don’t make him cry, you don’t make him fill out statements,” she told WNBC, holding back tears. “You don’t do it.”
An unnamed 28-year-old man was driving over a bridge in Roseville, California when his phone activated and startled him. He drove his station wagon into Pleasant Grove Creek, where it sank six to eight feet under water.
The Roseville Fire Department said the man used his handgun to shoot out his vehicle window, giving himself an opportunity to escape and swim to safety.
The man flagged down a passing vehicle and was treated for minor injuries by emergency crews.
Remember that tip the next time you drive into a body of water. Link -via Arbroath
Jeremy Bell of Toronto, Canada, bought a LEGO kit that assembles into a realistic facsimile of a handgun. Naturally, it struck him as a good idea to bring it to work:
It was the end of the day so Mr. Bell and a few colleagues decided to wind down by playing a few rounds of the video game Modern Warfare 2 at the office before heading home. A little while later, sudden, intense yelling filled the office hallways.
“We originally thought there was some sort of domestic dispute out there … that was until I clearly heard my name,” said Mr. Bell.
“The guy sounded seriously angry and was instructing me to slowly come into the hall with my hands on my head.”
It was Toronto’s Emergency Task Force, more commonly known as the SWAT team, responding to calls of a man in an office with a gun.
Link — Thanks, Jeremy Barker! | Photo: Global TV
UPDATE 12/5/09: Jeremy Bell has blogged about the incident (via Hell in a Handbasket).
We’ve posted some creative prison smuggling schemes before on Neatorama, but never one this … beefy:
An obese inmate in Texas has been charged after officials learned he had a gun hidden under flabs of his own flesh. [...] The 500-pound man was searched during his arrest and again at a city jail and the county jail, but officers never found the weapon in his rolls of skin. Vera admitted having the gun during a shower break at the county jail.
Link (Image: Houston Police Department)
Wired has a photogallery unusual accessories that you can mount on a firearm, including a cupholder and an iPhone mount. The latter includes an app that makes ballistics calculations based upon wind, distance, air pressure, humidity and temperature. Take your shot, then sip your beer.
Here’s a lesson for all you tough guys: don’t stick a gun in your pants to impress friends, lest you shoot off your manhood!
Lukas Neuhardt, 27, had forgotten to put the safety catch on when he stuffed the gun into his trouser pocket to impress pals in Saarbruecken, Germany.
He told paramedics that a masked mugger had blasted him in the crutch in a bungled robbery.
But police found a hole in his statement when they saw that the gunshot had miraculously left his trousers intact.
"Instead there was a charred hole in his pocket so either it was the shot of the century or he did it himself," said a police source.
W00t! It’s time for our collaboration with the ever-awesome What Is It? blog – this week’s mystery object is this gun: can you tell us what it is for? (It has a very specific function)
Place your guess in the comment section – the first to guess correctly will get a Free Neatorama T-Shirt. If no one got it, then the funniest guess will win. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many times as you wish.
For more clues, check out the What is it? Blog – good luck!
Update 2/20/09 – The answer is A Rokuoh-Sha Type 89 machine gun camera, used to train Japanese aviators in aerial gunnery. The first guess that’s specific enough was #15, by “Give the shirt to the funniest answer ” So, per that request, the free shirt goes to: Melphistopheles for his guess of early colonoscopy device!
Congrats Mel – and thank you to everybody for their awesome guesses. That was fun!
It’s just stupidity to shoot yourself, but it takes real talent to shoot yourself … without a gun! Here’s the bizarre story of one Howard Sheppard, 30, of Deltona, Florida who somehow shot himself in the arm without any firearms present:
Sheppard, who works at DeLand Memorial Gardens, told a nurse he picked up six rounds of ammunition and one of them discharged and struck him in the arm, Hudson said. When Sheppard said the other five rounds were in his shirt pocket, a security guard took the shirt and called police.
Sheppard initially said the ammunition was on a shelf and one of the bullets may have discharged because he threw a hammer and a string trimmer on the shelf, police said. After being pressed, he told Hudson that he secured the sixth bullet in a vise clamp, placed a metal punch into the cartridge primer and hit the punch with a hammer.
Link – via Dave Barry’s Blog
This fantastic papercraft model of Hellboy’s revolver The Good Samaritan features a working hinge and loadable bullets. It probably takes dozens of hours of tedious cutting and gluing, so why don’t we just gawk appreciatively at the pictures?
Link (in Japanese) – via Geekologie
The folks at Mythbusters are at it again. This time Kari Byron tested to see how long it would take for a M-134 Minigun to fell a tree. This neat clip demonstrates the gun’s amazing rapid rate of fire. Oh! and yes…it took 45 seconds to bring down the tree!!
Links: Liveleak
