Modern Use
The pepperbox design was used for a small number of weapon designs in the 20th century. In 1920, Mossberg produced the Mossberg Brownie, a 4-barrel .22LR pocket-pistol marketed to trappers. In the 1970s, the COP 357 Derringer was produced as a backup weapon for police officers.
Heckler & Koch used the pepperbox concept for their underwater P11 pistol.
While pepperboxes were usually handguns, a few rifle-sized guns were made; Samuel Colt owned a revolving 3-barrel matchlock musket from India, and the Colt Defender, a pepperbox rifle designed by Robert Hillberg, which utilized 3-inch 20-gauge magnum rounds and had 8 barrels which rotated around a central axis. One version of the Defender also had a receptacle for a tear-gas canister between the barrels.
Modern pepperbox shotguns include the FAMARS Rombo and the double-action 4-barrel Winchester Liberator, which was developed by Robert Hillberg prior to his work on the Defender. The Liberator was designed as an anticommunist insurgency weapon before being adopted by some US police forces and was named after its spiritual ancestor, the Liberator Pistol.
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