Early Repeating Firearms

Early Repeating Firearms

I am astonished at the number of repeating, magazine-fed firearms--sometimes repeating handguns--that appear in the 17th and 18th centuries. Yes, even in the era of flintlocks, there are people making handguns with rotating barrels, and one that is clever enough to automatically load the priming pan with gunpowder when the barrel rotates into position to fire.

These were probably devilishly hard to make, and perhaps not very reliable, but it does show that lots of clever people were working the problem--and apparently with some success--more than a century before Samuel Colt--and more than a century before the Second Amendment.