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No. 107561
ID: 3db750
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The Uniquely Awkward Sunngård Automatic Pistol - Harald Sunngård's modified handgun carried 50 rounds before needing a reload.
Harald Sunngård was a Norwegian inventor in the early years of the 20th century who noticed a common perceived weakness of automatic pistols: reloads under stress were often bungled by shooters, leaving them vulnerable to return fire without being able to shoot back. Doing the classic inventor thing, Sunngård figured out a solution to the problem in 1909–a two-part solution, in fact. The first part of his solution was to use a big magazine and a small cartridge, to maximize magazine capacity. The second part of his solution was to store a spare magazine right in the magazine well of the pistol for immediate use.
The grip of the pistol is long enough front-to-back to store two identical magazines. The front magazine sits higher than the rear one, and the bolt face on the slide feeds rounds from the front magazine into the chamber. Once the front magazine is empty, the shooter ejects it, and need only slide the rear magazine into the front position (and rack the slide) to continue shooting. There is a misconception that the pistol will fire automatically from both magazines in succession, but this is not true.
In addition to having the handy spare available, Sunngård designed the magazines to hold no fewer than 25 cartridges each (in the more common 6.5mm chambering). This gave the pistol a total of 50 rounds stored on-board, which was a major point in Sunngård's marketing. Even today, typical pistol magazines rarely exceed 18 rounds. Sunngård's concept was that in a gunfight, someone with his pistol could goad their opponent into firing 7 or 8 rounds (the typical capacity of an automatic pistol at the time), and they exploit an advantage when the opponent had to reload. Presumably, one would make sure not to get hit by any of those first 7 or 8 rounds…
The 6.5mm cartridge designed for Sunngård's pistol had a 23mm overall length, and used a 19mm long case. The projectile was a scant 28.5 grains (1.85 gram), and Sunngård claimed a muzzle velocity of just under 2000 ft/s (600 m/s)–which is almost certainly an exaggeration. There was also an 8mm version of the pistol made in much smaller numbers, which fired an equally light projectile (29gr / 1.88g), and may have gotten closer to the claimed velocity (magazines for the 8mm version held 18 rounds each). https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a18016/forgotten-weapon-sunngard-automatic-pistol/
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