Eight Barrel’s worth of 9mm Fun

Tippmann Armory makes a modern take on the famous Gatling Gun - The Gatling gun played a major role in Kitchener's defeat of the Mahdist forces. If General with them, Khartoum would not have fallen at the start of that war. As late as the Boxer Rebellion in China, a relief column rushing to try to rescue a British outpost with little hope of finding them alive was surprised to find that a very busy Gatling gun had preserved the lot of them.
Gatling guns continued in service in the U.S. and U.K. until 1911, when they were declared obsolete. They came back several decades later in the aforementioned weapons systems, as well as the 30mm tank buster cannon on the A-10 Warthog antitank airplane. Obviously they weren't obsolete after all.
Due to their size and weight, the Gatling gun has proved a problem for gun collectors. They do tend to take up the whole room when mounted on an artillery carriage and most wives are not in favor of them as the centerpiece of den décor.

ENTER TIPPMANN ARMORY with the solution: a small 27-inch-long, eight barrel Gatling Gun that stands 18 inches high on its wheels and is 20 inches wide. It weighs 60 pounds. A tripod is available. It is small enough to be displayed on your coffee table or desk and it is a real attention-getter.
This little gem shoots regular 9mm Luger ammo in 32-round Glock model 19 magazines. Now you can afford to have some fun with a Gatling gun! Fun is what this little gun is all about. There is nothing more fun to shoot than a machinegun, but they are heavily restricted under the National Firearms Act of 1934. Well, Gatling guns are exempt from the NFA machinegun category.
Gatling guns are designed to operate with very little wear on their moving parts as the gun operates. This makes for a very long life. The parts of the Tippmann gun that face wear or need strength are made of nickel plated 4140 steel.
These include the barrels, bolts, cam at the firing point, gears, and firing pin. The frame and rails are made of 1018 cold rolled steel.

Nine-millimeter Luger was chosen for the caliber because it is the cheapest available ammo, next to .22 LR. If you encounter a dud, it will be ejected as the crank turns and there will be a momentary skip in the burst as one round is missed. Thanks to the improvements in ammunition in the 1920s, the dreaded hangfire is almost unknown today. A hangfire is when a cartridge does not fire immediately when the primer is struck. They were common before the 1920s and were the bane of all manually operated machineguns, as a cartridge going off outside the chamber meant a serious jam. Read the rest of 9mm gatling gun.

“Lots of comments about mounting a cordless drill to it on Youtube.” [Daniel Ramsey, post 8]

“would that not constitute converting to an MG?” [RitchieAprile, post 9]

BATFE has ruled that manually operated Gatlings are not machine guns, but that powered ones are. The agency sometimes reverses itself and insists it can never be held responsible for mistakes made through good-faith interpretations of its rulings. Court challenges to its rules do not succeed. “Guilty until proven innocent” is the watchword in interpreting the National Firearms Act or other gun-related law.

Nothing new here (some of the history presented is nonsense too - go carefully).

Tippmann made subscale replicas of US M1919 and US 50 cal
M2 machine guns as far back as the 1970s. Fully functional, NFA-registered arms. The smaller chambered 22LR, the larger chambered 22WMR.

9mm is a better cartridge feed-wise: stronger and easier to feed through an action than any rimfire.

In the mid-1990s, a custom gunmaker from Palmyra, Nebraska attended then Fun & Freedom Shoot the staged each August, south of Kearney, Nebraska.

One summer, he brought along a Gatling (manually cranked) chambered in 9mm. Not sure if he made it or not. He did offer others for sale: a four-barrel Gatling chambered in US 50 cal Browning, and a GE M134 mounted on a 19th-century-style wooden carriage. The batteries to power its motor were concealed in one of the sideboxes. But his showcase & centerpiece was a full-scale replica of a Hotchkiss Revolving Cannon, with five barrels and carriage wheels five feet high, chambered for a custom cartridge he designed & made himself, unique to the gun. Purchase price was then $65,000.00. Weight was 2,700 pounds I think.

Recently, Colt’s reintroduced an exact copy of one of its original Gatlings - M1877 if memory serves. Chambered in 45-70; purchase price was $50,000.00. Prepaid orders only.

“... the 30mm tank buster cannon on the A-10 Warthog antitank airplane...” [from the original article]

To hear American gun enthusiasts tell it, the A-10 is the country’s only warplane, and its GAU-8 30mm gun is the only aircraft gun.

By the 1950s, jet aircraft had made most prior aircraft guns useless; they could not fire fast enough to give a useful probability of hit. General Electric modernized Gatling’s design in the 1950s, culminating in the M61 Vulcan, a 20mm piece with six barrels, capable of firing at a rate of 6,000 rounds per minute. It has equipped many US combat aircraft. A few: B-52H, B-58, F-104, F-105, F-4E, F-15, F-18, AC-130.

The Vulcan’s operating concept has been adapted to other gun sizes and different cartridges:

The 7.62 NATO “Miniguns” arming the AC-47 (first operational gunship)

50 cal machine gun rounds (GAU-12 as I recall)

25mm cartridges for AC-130 variants

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