The title above was also the title of an email an old friend sent me. Seems he had come across a picture of the Pistolia Con Caracato, a unique revolver that boasts three barrels.
Pity revolver manufacturers in the opening years of the 20th Century. Autoloading handguns had been invented a decade or so before that put their products to shame. Who would want a gun that only fired six shots, and was slow to reload, when they could have ten rounds and reload in a flash?
The gun companies tinkered with increasing the number of rounds available in revolvers, and they weren’t too shy about taking things to absurd lengths. As I’ve written about before, the most successful was a line of double barrelled guns from the French firearms firm of HDH.
But let us return to the matter at hand, the three barrel wonder.
The gun that caused my buddy to reach out seems to be a prototype of some kind. Let us take a closer look.
The There is no manufacturer’s mark, no proof marks that show the gun was test fired and proved to be safe to use, and what appears to be a serial number of “1”. The Italian words stamped in the metal mean “Overstuffed Pistol”, which is an apt description considering that the handgun holds 18 rounds.
Judging by the pictures above, this would be a pretty large revolver. Not too unmanagable, though, as the gun is chambered for the very small and pitiful .25 ACP cartridge. This would keep the size of the gun from growing to ridiculous proportions, but it also means the gun is way too underpowered to be considered an adequate self defense tool.
There is a selector switch on the revolver, which is extremely unusual, and it allows all three of the barrels to be fired at once with every pull of the trigger. Would this three-bullet bang mean the gun edges up into self-defense good-enough? Not in my opinion, as the .25 ACP is so underpowered that you really need about five going off at once to make a single decent punch.
So is there a five barrel revolver out there somewhere? Of course not. That would be absurd!