What?
> his own weapon: a fully automatic shotgun called the AA-12.
"Auto Assault-12 (AA-12), originally designed and known as the Atchisson Assault Shotgun, is a shotgun developed in 1972 by Maxwell Atchisson." [0]
What?
Can someone please explain to me what's going on here? Is this just my own ignorance or are these factual errors?
Looks like there was a bit of exaggeration going on, but not anything terribly out of line.
> In 1987, Max Atchisson sold the rights of the AA-12 to Jerry Baber of Military Police Systems, Inc., Piney Flats, Tennessee
Quoting the New Yorker in full
>[...]he started producing, from start to finish, his own weapon: a fully automatic shotgun called the AA-12.
it is obvious that he was the first to produce a mass market ready model. The article doesn't claim that he invented it.
Expecting someone who writes for the New Yorker to understand how firearms work is, I think, expecting rather too much.
...a dainty, short-haired woman in high heels casually grips the gun and fires off eight hundred balls of .20-calibre [sic] metal in four seconds...
Although this is pretty bad, it would have been worse if the "balls" were described as 20-gauge as the author intended rather than 20-caliber which is just silly.