Automatic shotgun AA-12 (9 photos + 1 video)

The AA-12 automatic rifle is one of the most interesting examples of promising weapons with great potential. Its development took two decades, but in the end it turned out to be of no use to anyone.





Essentially, a shotgun is an ideal weapon for assault and close combat. Be it trenches, military fortifications or city buildings, there is no better type of weapon to inflict massive damage on the enemy with almost one shot. The 12 gauge ammunition it uses is powerful enough to be very effective at close range. That is why during the Vietnam War, pump-action shotguns were in great demand among the American military.



The soldiers rightly believed that overwhelming firepower would help them push back the enemy in battles where clashes were fought face to face, literally a few meters between opponents. However, in practice everything turned out to be not so rosy. If a soldier managed to hit the enemy, he was most likely to immediately incapacitate him, since he received a powerful charge of shot, which had a great stopping effect. Otherwise, the shooter found himself in a not very advantageous position, since reloading required a lot of time even if there was no need to fill the gun’s magazine. As a result, due to the insufficient rate of fire and low fire density, the shooter completely lost his advantage. That’s when a certain Maxwell Atchisson, an engineer by training and a gunsmith-enthusiast by vocation, had an idea.





Atchisson's idea was simple - he just needed to make the shotgun work with a self-loading automatic mechanism. At the same time, he used a very original solution - the engineer combined two seemingly incompatible types of design: a submachine gun and a shotgun. In this case, the barrel moved back during the shot to compensate for the recoil. The latter was extremely important, since the cartridges themselves had great power, and several shots fired in succession with a high frequency inevitably tilted the barrel so that it became completely impossible to shoot.



In this way, it was possible to reduce the recoil to a tolerable level and still receive a constant barrage of fire. Considering that the cartridge contained from 9 to 16 pellets, the shooter could cause serious and irreparable damage to the enemy.



Of course, it wasn't without problems. For such a scheme of operation, the design of the gun required a receiver in the form of a tube, and due to the peculiarities of the mechanism, it had to be made quite long and massive. As a result, this part alone weighed almost one and a half kilograms. The rest of the gun resembled Frankenstein's monster. The trigger mechanism, which was supposed to be quite reliable and have the same safety margin, was borrowed from the Browning BAR-1918 light machine gun, and the rear part was completely taken from the M16 rifle.



The Atchisson rifle was called AAS (Atchisson Assault Shotgun). It was equipped with two types of magazines: a lighter box-shaped one, designed for five 12x70 mm cartridges, and a heavier one for twenty rounds. He presented his creation to the military in 1972, but for a number of very significant reasons in the literal sense of the word, they ended up buying it. The AAS shotgun, equipped with one 20-round magazine, weighed almost 7.5 kilograms, and the weight of one magazine exceeded two kilograms. Considering that the soldier always had to carry a considerable load on himself, this was too much.



Atchisson was distinguished by enviable tenacity and refused to accept the fact that his creation, on which he had worked for so long, turned out to be completely unviable. He decided to remake the rifle and build into it a return mechanism that runs on waste powder gases. He installed a gas piston above the barrel, which activated the bolt. True, a lot of space was required to roll back the bolt, and a butt was used for this. It is there that two springs are located, taking on most of the recoil from the shot.



Atchisson never brought his idea to fruition. He spent too much time and money on developing an automatic shotgun, and he was in real danger of going bankrupt. In order not to completely go bankrupt, in 1987 he was forced to sell his project to the company most interested in it - Military Police System, where it was renamed AA-12. There they worked hard on the gun, increased the magazine capacity to 32 rounds and increased the service life. In its latest version, it was possible to put almost any 12-gauge cartridges into the magazine, including specialized ones.



The AA-12 gun never reached mass production. It is known that in 2004 it was released in a tiny batch for testing, but then no movement towards mass production followed.