Winchester Liberator
Encyclopedia
The Winchester
Liberator is a 16-gauge, four-barrelled shotgun
, similar to a scaled up four-shot double action derringer
. It was an implementation of the Hillberg Insurgency Weapon design. Robert Hillberg
, the designer, envisioned a weapon that was cheap to manufacture, easy to use, and provided a significant chance of being effective in the hands of someone who had never handled a firearm
before. Pistols and submachine gun
s were eliminated from consideration due to the training required to use them effectively. The shotgun was chosen because it provided a very high volume of fire with a high hit probability. Both Winchester and Colt built prototypes, although the Colt eight-shot design came late in the Vietnam War and was adapted for the civilian law enforcement market. No known samples were ever produced for military use.
Winchester Repeating Arms Company
The Winchester Repeating Arms Company was a prominent American maker of repeating firearms, located in New Haven, Connecticut. The Winchester brand is today used under license by two subsidiaries of the Herstal Group, Fabrique Nationale of Belgium and the Browning Arms Company of Morgan, Utah.-...
Liberator is a 16-gauge, four-barrelled shotgun
Shotgun
A shotgun is a firearm that is usually designed to be fired from the shoulder, which uses the energy of a fixed shell to fire a number of small spherical pellets called shot, or a solid projectile called a slug...
, similar to a scaled up four-shot double action derringer
Derringer
The term derringer is a genericized misspelling of the last name of Henry Deringer, a famous 19th-century maker of small pocket pistols. Many copies of the original Philadelphia Deringer pistol were made by other gun makers worldwide, and the name was often misspelled; this misspelling soon became...
. It was an implementation of the Hillberg Insurgency Weapon design. Robert Hillberg
Robert Hillberg
Robert Hillberg is a firearm designer. He was the former head of High Standard Manufacturing Company. His designs included the folding shotgun stock, the Whitney Wolverine, the Wildey .45 gas-operated pistol, and the four-shot COP 357 Derringer...
, the designer, envisioned a weapon that was cheap to manufacture, easy to use, and provided a significant chance of being effective in the hands of someone who had never handled a firearm
Firearm
A firearm is a weapon that launches one, or many, projectile at high velocity through confined burning of a propellant. This subsonic burning process is technically known as deflagration, as opposed to supersonic combustion known as a detonation. In older firearms, the propellant was typically...
before. Pistols and submachine gun
Submachine gun
A submachine gun is an automatic carbine, designed to fire pistol cartridges. It combines the automatic fire of a machine gun with the cartridge of a pistol. The submachine gun was invented during World War I , but the apex of its use was during World War II when millions of the weapon type were...
s were eliminated from consideration due to the training required to use them effectively. The shotgun was chosen because it provided a very high volume of fire with a high hit probability. Both Winchester and Colt built prototypes, although the Colt eight-shot design came late in the Vietnam War and was adapted for the civilian law enforcement market. No known samples were ever produced for military use.