First appearing in the decade of so before World War One, the Scheintod guns were designed to fire either flash or irritant cartridges, not lethal projectiles. The word “scheintod”, in fact, translates to something along the lines of “apparent death”, as in something that looks lethal but actually isn’t. They would remain popular as self-defense weapons through the 1920s, and were made in a wide variety of configurations. This one is a particularly large example, with 5 chambers nearly 3 inches in length. It would have fired a round of red pepper, tobacco powder, or other eye and nose irritants.
If you speak German how accurate is Ian’s translation of Scheintod?
German here. Did not wartch the vid. A scheintod person would appear to be dead, with no signs of breathing, heartbeat… like comatose, but only more so, but not dead dead. The word is no longer in active use, and I cannot explain how they differentiated between dead for real and scheintod. The use as a noun to label a product range or company is not really a German thing, seems to me a non native went through a German dictionary and found a nice sounding compound. I’d probably not appear dead with a barrelful of pepper irritant in the face, but rather screaming, vomiting, running away. Could also be that a German wanted to do a play with words, cos the thing appears (scheint) to be a deadly waepon (Tod, [means of] death), but we Germans are usually neither that imaginative, dark humored or funny at all.
I think it is probably supposed to be word play then. The inventor also put a little skeleton man dancing on the side. So maybe he was also a comedian or wasn’t born in Germany.