In the early 1960s, an influential but little-known (today) firearms designer by the name of Robert Hillberg came up with an idea for a cheap-but-effective armament for the masses. With encouragement from DARPA, the Winchester company took up manufacture and development of the design, under the name “Liberator”.
The guns were initially planned to be made almost entirely as magnesium castings, with steel liners in the barrels, with a total cost of about $20 per gun. They would use prepackaged 4-round ammunition packets as well, rather than standard individual shotgun shells. By the time production was actually begun, however, the design had been altered to a break-action system using regular shells – the prepackaged quad-cartridges proved too difficult to perfect. So the production Mark II guns used conventional shells with a break-open action.
As it turned out, casting the frames over the steel barrel inserts was a quite difficult process, and Winchester soon moved to a MkIII design which replace the barrel casting with 4 independent all-steel barrels fixed at the muzzles by a stamped plate. By this time, however, military interest in the guns had fallen away…
Ian’s video: [16:42] https://youtu.be/PQK9JNsrq_8?si=
https://www.forgottenweapons.com/winchesters-liberator-shotguns-video/
I understand the appeal to a military/government of creating ultra cheap arms to supply to a friendly guerrilla force. I’ll never understand why purpose built designs to this level of simplicity were ever pursued instead of say, just continuing to make M3 Grease Guns. Already insanely cheap, the production lines already exist (this is a big one), there’s going to be no money sunk in research and development or teething issues, and it would actually work better.
Obviously these ultra cheap designs never really worked out and the US (and other nations) did simply supply older outdated surplus arms to friendly forces. I just don’t understand why somebody looked at that situation and said “needs more pipe guns though”.
Maybe it’s another company trying to get the contract that a competitor already has? If you can invent and manufacture a better/cheaper alternative, then you can get a lucrative government contract.