9 Handguns Enter ‘The Ugly Pistol Club’by
Aaron Samsel Previously by Aaron Samsel: Civil Rights Leader and Gun-Owner Martin Luther King, Jr.
Let’s face it guys, most guns are a work of functional art that blends something mechanical into something magical. However, what can’t be denied is that there are a few firearms out there that never really worked out that magical part. Handguns it seems are the worst of the offenders, with more than a few horribly ugly designs floating around. Sure, this is a cosmetic issue and as long as the gun goes bang reliably, who really cares what it looks like? Well for those who do, we wrote this article. 1. Liberator
Liberator Pistol The ultimate in disposable, single-use pistols, the FP-45 Liberator was designed in World War 2 to be simple and cheap enough to make that they could be thrown away, twice. The first time was out of an airplane over occupied Europe. The second time was after it was used to knock off your local wayward Nazi – the thinking was you could then grab his gun and keep trucking. Built for peanuts, these bad boys cost a mint now to collectors. 2. Hi-Point
Hi-point C9 Yes, we have all seen the torture videos where they pull stuff on these oversize Zymak wonders and they just keep on banging away. However, you can’t say that they aren’t as homely as your wife’s cousin Wanda. Still, it looks better than the older Maverick/Stallard JS potmetal designs that preceded it. Well, talk about comparing apples to…well we can’t think of a fruit as ugly as a Stallard so we’ll stop there. 3. Dardicks
The proprietary ammunition the Dardick fired was known as the tround (seriously). No, not the vacuum cleaners on wheels that chase Dr. Who. The term Dardick in the world of oddball firearms refers to inventor David Dardick who in the 1950s had some interesting ideas. He thought that the gun should be all about the bullet it fired so he invented a triangular cartridge called a tround and a series of guns to fire them. Not only did it combine all the worst facets of a revolver with the bad parts of a semi-auto *and* use a totally unique round, the gun was also pretty hard on the eyes. 4. Rogak P-18
Rogak P-18 Steyr had an American importer by the name of Rogak run away with their GB design in the early 1980s and tweak it a little before selling it under his own name. It has a definite CZ52 look to it but had an 18-shot magazine when the polymer Glock, itself not a beauty queen, only carried 17. Take that Gatson! 5. Mataba
Technically the Macchine Termo-Balistiche Model 6 Unica but known to the world as the Mataba Auto-revolver, this Italian stallion looks so far out there, its only real home has been in a couple dozen of movies. It seems that whenever a director wants a futuristic gun the prop master smiles and pulls out one of these. With its cylinder above the barrel and recoil that cocks the hammer every time, it is an interesting design that collectors seem to love. Today the Mataba’s mantle has been picked up by the visually similar Chiappas Rhino and others, so it would seem gun owners today still have a taste for funky revolvers. January 25, 2013
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