In my recent New Yorker story (still just an abstract online), about Jerry Baber’s shotgun-toting robots, I describe a few of Baber’s demonstration videos — some of which have been viewed a couple million times on YouTube. But it’s hard for a paragraph to do them justice, so I’m including here a sampling of my own favorite Baber vids (in addition to the one I posted yesterday, which gives a nice overview of the AA-12 in action).
First, this surprisingly little-viewed footage covers the entire armed robot “family”:
Here we have the armed autocopter gunship, with Baber overseeing a firing test:
And a real classic, “Scary Scottish girl with Automatic Weapon!”:
If that’s not enough for you, you can check out the AA-12 mounted on and fired from an SUV. Or for those looking for something a bit more sleek and official, here’s one put together for the Military Times Web site. There are several videos on the Robotex site, and then there’s an animation of the design concept killer robot, put together by Robotex founder Terry Izumi. The AA-12 has also featured on the Discovery Channel’s “Future Weapons” program, an appearance rumored to be the source of at least one foreign leader’s interest in the shotguns.
Posted at 1:35 pm | Filed under Military, Technology, The New Yorker |
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10 Responses to “Watch Baber’s back-yard arsenal in action”
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How could you not ask this guy about the Virginia Tech massacre? He’s a graduate. Big hole in the story for me.
@ajt: In fact, I talked to Baber several times about the V Tech incident. It just wasn’t particularly relevant to the story, which isn’t about gun control or the general use of guns. But if you read closely, I quote Baber on the general issue:
“Police departments asked for AA-12s, but Baber decided that the gun was too powerful to risk selling outside the military. He donated one to his local county sheriff, but turned everyone else away. “I don’t want that on my conscience—something I created going out and killing people all over the damn place,” he said. “I’m not worried about what does over in Iraq or Afghanistan. That’s fine.” ”
For what it’s worth, his view of the VT massacre itself is fairly typical most ardent pro-gun folk — some version of “if one of those students had a gun, they could have stopped it.”
Just think how much a terrorist headed to Mumbai, or an American offshore target would like to get their hands on one of these. Especially if these weapons are so easily modified so as to accept a variety of ammo.
Has Barber explored any modifications to ’scram’ the guns to make them instantly unusable and unsafe to dismantle? I doubt it.
Remember, the Dr. Gattling and others in the early development of the machine gun felt it would ‘bring peace.’ Yeah right.
Just by publicizing such endeavors for low-rent mass killing machines like this guys like Barber are doing nothing less than sowing business for themselves and ensuring that Iran and other countries who are looking for a regional ‘edge’ will deploy their engineers and scientists to pursue similar avenues of havoc for the flesh.
Why do Americans like Terminator movies so much?
[...] Evan Ratliff, who wrote the article, posts this demonstration video of Baber’s weaponry on his website: Share and [...]
This piece rocks! Can’t beat that opening paragraph. You’re quickly becoming one of my favorite New Yorker authors, thanks.
Could you post the rest of Baber’s interview?
PS: I also liked the first Terminator movie, it was a great show. T2, not so much.
[...] This has not been a good twelve months for people worried that Ray Kurtzweil’s Singularity look less like the Jetsons and more like the Terminator franchise or that creepy film from the Animatrix. Big dog was bad enough, even before some joker put horns on it. Then I had to read about the guy in Alabama who invented and built the world’s first no-recoil fully automatic 12-gauge shotgun and, oh, by the way, has a passion for robots. [...]
[...] This has not been a good twelve months for people worried that Ray Kurtzweil’s Singularity look less like the Jetsons and more like the Terminator franchise or that creepy film from the Animatrix. Big dog was bad enough, even before some joker put horns on it. Then I had to read about the guy in Alabama who invented and built the world’s first no-recoil fully automatic 12-gauge shotgun and, oh, by the way, has a passion for robots. [...]