I recently wrote an essay that explored how the supply of illegal guns will never dry up no matter how restrictive the laws against private ownership happen to be. It is just too easy for an unscrupulous amateur hobbyist to make a home made firearm for sale to criminals for that to happen.

Fjolnirsson was kind enough to leave a comment….

“Were I a criminal, I wouldn’t even go that far. I’d make a simple, single shot weapon, easy to conceal. With this, it would be a simple matter to kill a cop for a weapon of superior quality.”

There actually was a handgun manufactured with that very purpose in mind. It was called the Liberator.

Looks like a crude tin toy that a child might play with, doesn’t it? It wasn’t made with much more care, believe me!

Designed to be as inexpensive as possible, assembled from mostly stamped sheet-metal parts, the Liberator was a single shot pistol chambered for the .45 ACP cartridge the US military was using for standard handguns and submachine guns. It was so cheap that each one set the US government back only $2.40 in 1942 money. A million were made in less than three months during the darkest days of WWII, to be airdropped to Resistance fighters in enemy occupied territory.

The gun came packaged in a cardboard box with ten rounds of ammo, a wooden stick to poke out the fired cartridge so the gun could be reloaded, and a comic strip which showed how to use the thing.

(Picture source.)

The gun was so crude, so short ranged, and had such limited firepower that it would have been insane for anyone to try and use one to shoot it out with military troops. Instead the purpose was to use one to blow out the brains of an inattentive enemy by stealth, just before discarding the Liberator in favor of whatever gear the soldier had on him. (”Loot the corpse! Loot the corpse!“)

So the plan was to sow discord and ruin enemy morale by having every bush and rock conceal an armed freedom fighter, Liberator pistol loaded and ready, just aching to put one of the hated occupiers down for the Motherland.

Didn’t work out that way. The OSS , a spy organization staffed with hard-bitten men who had seen their share of combat, was tasked with distributing the weapons. They took one look at this toy that could shoot one round every minute or so and laughed themselves sick. Only a handful were passed out to Resistance fighters in Europe, and I bet a lot more were taken home by OSS officers to be given without ammo to their young sons to be used playing Cowboys-and-Indians.

Only Chinese troops were supplied with Liberators in any numbers, probably because the top brass wanted to do something with the things in order to avoid charges that money had been wasted. There is no record at all that any Liberator was ever used for the intended purpose.

Cheap as anything back in the day, crudely made and practically worthless, Liberators that still exist are valuable collectors items. Adjusted for inflation, the guns that were produced in 1942 cost about $40 in today’s cash. Liberators in good condition, with the original cardboard box and comic strip instruction manual, can go for $2000 or more.

And so we find the real value of this top secret weapons program is to make gun geeks happy seven decades in the future.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 21st, 2009 at 9:12 am and is filed under Gun and Gear Review, History, Military. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.