6 Awesomely Insane Guns People Actually Used (Pt. 2)

The gunblade was displayed it at the National Maritime Museum in London before it was sold at auction for a cool 11,000 pounds. And yes, before some smartass points it out, the sword-pistols weren't very effective in battle. They ended up as a novelty brandished by officers of high rank, useful only when Nelson couldn't be bothered to manually remove the fools who had so peskily found themselves lodged to his blade. But who cares? It's a SWORD that is also a GUN. The moment you tell somebody you own it, you've won the only battle that matters.

You might be surprised to learn this, but Henry VIII was sort of a dick. After all, there's his axe-shaped distrust of divorce proceedings, penchant for gluttony whilst his kingdom starved, and his bizarre bespectacled-demon mask. Oh, and the fact that, in a move that surely put everyone within a 100-foot radius on edge, he substituted his walking cane with a freaking mace/gun combo weapon.

That's right -- alongside the ferocious spikes, the mace played host to several cleverly concealed gun barrels. In the event that the king was besieged by enemies, removing them would have been a matter of simply aiming the mace and lighting a fuse at the end of the handle.

Sadly, there's no record of him using this weapon, which makes sense given that the concept is, well, not the most practical in the world. But once again, this requires the narrowest possible definition of "using" a weapon -- impressing other dudes at parties is also a "use."

Let's start with the pistol: The Italian-made Pistola con Caricato looks like something an Antonio Banderas character would use to avenge his wife's death at the hands of a drug lord. This three-barreled, 18-chambered toy for the criminally insane is even hefty enough for melee use, should it ever malfunction due to the immense gravitational forces caused by its own bulk. In Italian, Caricato can mean "caricature" or possibly even "stuffed" -- presumably because any punkass that messes with its holder will shortly find himself saturated with enough lead to wallpaper every X-ray room in the country.

This early 20th-century Italian offering is built with a locking mechanism that allows the frugal shooter to fire a single bullet from any of the three barrels. Or one can fire all three at once, producing a miniature buckshot effect as the bullets travel slightly outward. It's also easy to load, as it simply pops open:

Sadly, the Pistola's particulars are lost to history, as there's no mention of this great destroyer of worlds in any record. It's also mysteriously absent from the Encyclopedia of Bitchin' Guns. The only clue is a marking on the gun that reads "01-CAL .6.35." It's believed that the "01" denotes the gun as a prototype and possibly as the only such revolver in existence.

Now, if you prefer your gun to be even more impossible to conceal, you could go for this:

That's the Nock gun, a volley gun invented sometime in the late 18th century to answer the age-old question, "What has seven barrels, dislocates your arm, and lights your own fortress on fire when shot?" The gun's seven smoothbore barrels fire at once, so it has the kickback of seven flintlock muskets all being focused neatly into your fragile arm bones.

Invented by James Wilson and manufactured by Henry Nock, the Nock gun was used by the British Royal Navy during the early stages of the Napoleonic Wars. And we do stress the word "early" because it didn't take long for the navy to realize how impractical these weapons really were. The recoil of seven barrels' simultaneous discharge was enough to dislocate, fracture, and otherwise maim its wielder. Also, the recoil would sometimes blast the gun completely out of your hands and onto the deck below, where you would have to scramble to find it and reload it, which took as long as you would imagine reloading a seven-barrelled flintlock rifle would be.

It was also highly inaccurate, as it's pretty much like aiming a malfunctioning fire hose by yourself, except this fire hose sprays bullets and lights fires. However, in their favor, volley guns like the Nock gun were never meant to have precision aiming. We mean, look at that shit.

The Nock gun had a specialized use on ships because the sailors would be more tightly packed, and it was easier to hit them all with your enormous cone of death from atop the rigging where you would just aim down somewhere and pull the trigger. This seems like the best place for Nock guns, until you found that all the resultant muzzle flash could, and did, light the sails and rigging on fire. Even though ships are on the water, they are still notoriously hard to fight fires on, especially during a battle. You basically had to hope the enemy was so impressed by how crazy your ass was that they'd just call off the battle.

Consisting of a single-shot .38 pistol mounted onto a leather glove, this ingeniously named "glove gun" was designed specifically for assassinations and other secretive purposes -- really any time you needed to murder someone in the face but don't want to get your hands messy. Officially called the Sedgley OSS .38 glove pistol, it was manufactured in the World War II in Philadelphia. In order to use it, the only things that the wearer had to do were to cock the gun and throw a punch. On hitting the enemy, a plunger would be pressed, firing off a single round into whatever extremity you didn't want to exist anymore.

In one famous anecdote, a naval officer in the Pacific Theater was provided with one to use against any enemy forces that boarded their boat. More specifically, he was instructed to surrender immediately and raise his hands above his head, thus hiding the gun barrel until an enemy got close enough. Fortunately for the enemy forces but unfortunately for the litany of great gun stories, no one ever boarded said boat.

Also, if you're wondering where you've seen this gun before, it was Inglourious Basterds.

The gun was nested inside a standard small shield about 1.5 feet in diameter. Records are spotty on the firing mechanics, but the style seemed to be a rear-loaded matchlock musket pistol, which means that when someone was charging you, or just walking if they were feeling lazy, you had to whip out your match to light the fuse to fire the musket ball. And you probably had to make sure not to aim your shield down too much, or the ball would just roll right out onto the dirt.

In the early 20th century, the police had a problem: switching between their clubs and guns during battles with criminals was taking precious time away from administering old-timey beat downs. To this end, they created a prototype weapon capable of smoothly transitioning from cracking skulls to filling perps full of lead. What could possibly go wrong?

Christened "The Compensator" (by us, just now), it consisted of a standard-issue Smith & Wesson Model 10 with a wooden billy club attached bayonet-style onto the barrel. As you'd expect from a weapon of such awe-inspiring complexity, using it was simply a matter of deciding how you'd like to ruin whoever was unfortunate enough to be doing crime in your vicinity. Of course, the club had a hole in it to allow you to gun down anyone who you failed to beat sufficiently.

Needless to say, this design didn't come without its flaws. For starters, have you tried accurately aiming a gun with the equivalent of a chair leg weighing down the barrel? If the police ever needed to fire a projectile, they would have been better off dismantling the damn thing and throwing the club itself. Meanwhile, swinging the billy club was an awkward affair that, had it been tried in the real world, would have ended with someone either getting shot in the face, or the bad guy wrestling the gun away. Plus there's the fact that you would always be on the verge of accidentally shooting somebody, since you're gripping your billy club by a live trigger. That may be why the gun was never put into mass production. But here us out: What if you replaced the club with ... a Taser?

When Adam isn't causing trouble on Twitter, he writes about conspiracy theories for his website.

For more insane weapons, check out 5 Advanced Weapons Clearly Invented by a 6-Year-Old and If 5-Year-Olds Were In Charge of Weapon Design.