POTD: A Fully Automatic Shotgun – The Legendary USAS-12
Sam.S 08.16.23
Welcome to today’s Photo of the Day! Here we have a Call of Duty gun if there ever was one. The peculiar USAS-12 shotgun originated from 1980s designs by American Maxwell Atchisson. In 1989, Gilbert Equipment decided to produce a selective-fire shotgun based on Atchisson’s work. They enlisted South Korean company Daewoo Precision Industries to manufacture the USAS-12. Mass-produced through the 1990s, the USAS-12 was sold internationally to military and police forces. Around the same time, Gilbert unsuccessfully tried bringing a semi-auto version to the U.S. civilian market. The original USAS-12 remains available only for military/law enforcement overseas from Daewoo, while some semi-auto clones have been produced in small batches for government agencies.
“Originally developed in the 1980s, the USAS-12 takes many design cues from Maxwell Atchisson’s 1970s vintage Atchisson Assault Shotgun, being a gas-operated magazine fed shotgun patterned after the M-16/AR-15 family of rifles, in particular arranging the firearm to put the barrel as close in line with the shoulder as possible to diminish felt recoil. First conceived as a military weapon, Gilbert Equipment teamed up with Daewoo Precision Industries of South Korea to produce the USA-12 as a full automatic shotgun for government contract sales, later formulating a semi-automatic model for the North American commercial market. Arriving on American shores in the late 80s and early 90s, the semi-auto UAS-12 soon ran face first into the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives, who used the wording of the National Firearms Act to have the shotgun (along with the cylinder-fed Armsel Striker-12, aka the Street Sweeper) declared a Destructive Device; while shotguns are traditionally given a pass on having a bore greater than a half-inch, this only legally applies to items “generally recognized as particularly suitable for sporting purposes”, with said recognition more or less entirely hinging on the ATF’s opinion on the matter.”
Lot 661: Gilbert Equipment USAS-12 Semi-Automatic Shotgun – Gilbert Equipment Company USAS-12 Semi-Automatic Shotgun, Class III/NFA Destructive Device. (n.d.-aj). Rock Island Auction Company. photograph. Retrieved August 15, 2023, from https://www.rockislandauction.com/detail/77/661/gilbert-equipment-usas12-semiautomatic-shotgun.
