Gun of the Future

Imagine, if you will kind reader, an upgrade of the venerable firearm.  Since the first musket engineers have worked to refine the design.  Step by step Kentucky rifles have become the modern assault weapons; complex machines hundreds of times more powerful and useful on the battlefield than those ancestral guns.  However, complexity can drive up cost and drive down reliability.  


Metal Storm might change all that.  Their patented idea is to stack all the bullets in the barrel, right where they need to be.  No magazine, no bolt, no reciever, no return spring, no ejection pin - none of the machinery to move bullets into the barrel.  Instead an array of tubes that are gun barrels and bullet storage are attached to a stock.  A computer in the stock controls which bullet fires next.  Yes, it sounds crazy, but it works:

Each barrel only fires a few rounds before being replaced, so there is no expensive steel barrel that must last for thousands of rounds.  Each Barrel/Magazine Cluster (BMC) will be made of steel-strong composite.  Shoot until empty, then replace and shoot some more.  Below is an image I made in Google Sketchup of a possible 20-shot 12ga Metal Storm shotgun.  

4 barrels, 5 shots per barrel, and the whole gun is lighter than a loaded 7-shot standard shotgun.  Shoot 20 times, break it open, toss the BMC, and put in another.  This same system would work with every bullet from .22 to 40mm grenade.  You wouldn't even need to change guns, just drop in a different BMC.


Now imagine a Taser in a shotgun shell.  The XREP is just that, a fully contained Taser designed to be fired from a 12ga shotgun.  Effective out to 50 yards, the XREP downs the target for 20 seconds, more than long enough for officers to take the perpetrator into custody.

Officers could now shoot first in dangerous situations, knowing the nonlethal XREP will give all involved a moment to think.  Suicide by cop might never happen again, riots be quelled without injuries, and innocent citizens will survive an errant shot.


Sometimes the future really is better.