Bullets and batteries

“Shoot!,” my latest piece for The New Yorker, hit the streets today. It’s available to subscribers on the Web, but everyone else will have to shell out for a copy, retro-style. It’s a profile of one Jerry Baber, an engineer from Piney Flats, Tennessee, and his work. That work being the making of gun parts, and from those parts building the AA-12 — a stainless steel fully-automatic 12-gauge shotgun — and with that shotgun helping to create several small, fully-armed and remotely-controlled air and ground robots that he believes will change the future of warfare.

As Baber likes to say of his creations, which he keeps in his workshop and often unleashes in his backyard, “I asked them what they wanted for Christmas, and they said, ‘bullets and batteries.’”

I’ll be posting some of Baber’s videos here, along with some additional passages that didn’t make the article’s final cut. For now, I’ll leave you with a little introduction to the AA-12:

Posted at 12:43 am | Filed under Military, Technology, The New Yorker |

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2 Responses to “Bullets and batteries”

  1. jeffo on February 18th, 2009 6:29 pm

    sweet! can’t wait to read it. congrats.

  2. va loan on November 5th, 2009 6:38 pm

    Automatic Shotguns are sick. That is one beast of a gun!

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I'm Evan Ratliff, a freelance journalist and feature writer for Wired, The New Yorker, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, and other publications. I'm also the story editor for Pop-Up Magazine, the world's first live magazine.

with story tips, suggestions, complaints.