Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on forgottenweapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum,
I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction Company, and we are taking a look at the Franchi LAW-12
This may not look like it, but this is actually a very close relative of the very iconic SPAS-12 combat shotgun.
And this is like the stripped-down lightweight version that was marketed specifically to law enforcement, but never really took off.
It was imported into the US, and is actually... really the most easily available of all of Franchi's combat shotguns.
Now the SPAS-12 was introduced in 1979, this followed not very long afterwards and the justification for this in combination
and, the justification for this, in combination, "why would they make this and be making the SPAS-12?"
"The SPAS-12 is obviously the cooler, better gun," right? Well...
Maybe not necessarily. The SPAS-12 has gotten notoriety, first off 'cause it was in a lot of movies,
and, it looks... different and aggressive, it's got this weird hook on the buttstock,
and it's got a really massive front-end assembly that looks, well, aggressive and intimidating.
However, there was a very real purpose for that. The SPAS-12 was...
convertible, it could be used either as a semi-auto shotgun or as a pump-action shotgun.
And, in a law-enforcement market, there was a particularly good use for this, so that you could fire rounds, like, nonlethal.
You could fire tear gas rounds, you could fire beanbag rounds, you could fire pepper ball sorts of rounds.
These cartridges, they're typically quite low-recoil, and wouldn't cycle a semi-auto shotgun.
So, they manufactured one where if you're firing buckshot - okay, great.
Run the forend all the way forward, lock it in place, run it as a semi-auto shotgun,
and you get the most efficiency out of it. But, if you are doing riot duty, and you're not firing lethal ammunition,
well, now you can unlock the handguard, and you can manually cycle these special-purpose rounds that you wouldn't normally be able to run.
But not every law-enforcement department is going to have that sort of need.
So, for example, a lot of them are going to use a completely different gun for less-lethal ammunition,
in order to avoid any chance of some officer picking up a gun that happens to be loaded with buckshot,
thinking it's loaded with pepper balls, and... obliterating some protester.
Well, instead, they'll use like, only shotguns that have blue furniture on them, or something like that, for less-lethal ammo.
And, there're... plenty of people who are interested in buying a shotgun who didn't really need that extra manual pump-action option.
It added weight to the gun, it added complexity to the gun - honestly, the SPAS-12 isn't all that great or comfortable of a shotgun.
And for those people who didn't want all of that extra stuff on the front, that's what the LAW-12 was.
This is basically - from the receiver back, it's basically the same as a SPAS-12.
And, from the receiver forward, it's substantially slimmer.
So the gas system is the same basic design, but not interchangeable.
And it has no manual pump-action option. This is just a semi-auto shotgun.
It's got about a 21, 21½-inch barrel,
magazine tube holds 8 rounds, plus 1 in the chamber, about as large a capacity as you're going to get on a
traditionally-configured shotgun like this.
Nice pistol-grip stock, this was presumably going to be an appealing law-enforcement firearm.
Before we get into whether or not it was, let's take a close look at exactly how it works,
cause it's easy to pull off the front end and show you.
Alright, "LAW-12, Luigi Franchi S.P.A. Brescia, made in Italy".
I should point out on some of the SPAS-12s,
they actually abbreviate this as "L. Franchi" and a lot of people think that it's the SPAS-12 L model,
law-enforcement only, something to that effect. It's not.
There's only one version of the LAW-12, there's only one version of the SPAS-12.
Anyway...
There are a couple of cool features on here. One of them is the fact that it has two safeties.
So this is, we have our manual safety here set to fire,
There we go, snapped it across, it's now safe.
However, we also have what looks kind of like an M1-style safety right there.
And this does two things. This is the bolt-release, so,
if you have a round chambered and the hammer cocked, and you want to unload it manually,
you have to engage that.
This also acts as a secondary safety, and they called it the "quick-employment" safety.
The idea was you could have the gun, magazine tube full, round chambered, safety off,
but, as long as you have this engaged...
the trigger's disconnected, and the gun is safe. And then when you want to use it, all you have to do is just
pop that forward with your trigger finger, and it's ready to go.
So this offered sort of an intermediate, um, safety option,
where if you wanted the gun accessible faster than maybe with that rather stiff button
you could use this.
There's also a magazine disconnect built in, which is kind of a cool feature,
this is sort of a way to make up for the fact that, for a law-enforcement market, that it doesn't have a pump-action feature.
So, right now I have one round in the tube and I have one round in the chamber, both dummy rounds obviously,
and let's say hypothetically I've got, y'know I'm using buckshot or something,
and I want to fire a specialty round, a beanbag or some sort of round that I'm pretty sure isn't going to cycle the action.
Or I just want to special-load one round, like I've got a tube full of buckshot and I want to fire one slug.
What I can do is actually click this button down into place,
that's the magazine disconnect, then we'll engage our...
quick-employment safety there, I can pop that round out,
and you'll notice when I've opened the bolt here, I still have a round stuck in the magazine,
because, with this button depressed, the magazine doesn't automatically feed.
So now I've got the gun locked open and empty, now I can take my specialty round,
let's just say it's this one, I can drop that into the ejection port, press the bolt release,
and now I've chambered that specific round.
Now, I don't know if it's this gun in particular or if it's common to all of them, but,
the jolt from closing the bolt tends to unlatch that magazine disconnect, so,
as long as there's a round in the magazine you can always push that button in
and that will prevent the magazine from actually popping out the next round when you fire.
If you want to disconnect it so it's like, "okay, I've got my one round, I wanna make sure
that when I fire next, I'm gonna get something out of the magazine," then you just push it forward,
and it disconnects like that, so, engaged, disengaged.
Disassembly is pretty easy. We just- there's no detent or anything, we just have this knurled band on the magazine extension here.
Pull this off... like I said, 8 in the tube, 1 in the gun.
Once that comes loose...
that's the end of our magazine tube, and then this is the magazine spring.
With that off, I can then slide...
the handguard off. This is actually wood, rather thin wood, with an insert in the front,
and a little polymer sleeve on the back.
And here is our gas system. I can, at this point, just pull the barrel off the front.
That comes out.
And then, there's our gas piston. So we've got two parts here,
this is the actual piston part that takes the impact of the gas,
and then this is connected to the spring,
and these two arms which are connected to the bolt carrier and then the bolt.
The gas block and the two gas ports are connected directly into the barrel here,
you can see two little gas vents down in there,
those are going to blow gas back onto the front surface here of the piston, which drives it backwards.
The whole thing, the whole gas piston assembly, is operating on top of or around the magazine tube.
That hole right there is the magazine tube.
And when the bolt is cycling, it's in this forward position. When it locks, it gets pushed backward like that.
That pushes the locking lug up,
which locks into this recess on the top of the barrel, and that's how it stays locked and safe when it fires.
Couple other little features here, it came standard with a bead sight.
It also has a threadable, the barrel's threaded for choke tubes.
This threading is the same as the SPAS-12, so any SPAS-12 muzzle accessories, the LAW-12 can also take.
There's a ring on the front of the magazine extension for your front sling swivel.
The rear sling swivel is molded into this hollow polymer stock.
The stocks are also interchangeable with those of the SPAS-12.
Be aware there are two different versions of the SPAS-12 folding stock, if you decide that you want to get one of those,
one of them actually locks onto the SPAS-12 rear sight in the folded position,
while there is no rear sight on the LAW-12 to interact with that, so,
if you want one, make sure you get the one that locks in the pistol grip itself.
The fire control parts are also identical on the two guns, so
these did originally have a lever safety on them,
if you get one with the lever safety, be very careful, that was the subject of a recall,
it can be repaired, it should be repaired, and make sure you do, because otherwise, they eventually will
fail, in that they will fire when you move the gun from safe to fire, that's a serious problem.
However, because the fire control parts are the same,
that also means that the scope mounts made for the SPAS-12* will fit the LAW, because
they replaced the pins in the fire control group and those pins are the same on both guns.
Well, maybe I've already sort of given it away, but this didn't turn out to be a particularly successful
commercial product.
It just didn't really bring anything unique and novel to the table, to offer that the myriad of other shotguns on the market,
including American-made ones here in the US, offered.
It was a fairly expensive gun.
To me, the handling just isn't really all that great,
the pistol grip is really quite large,
I don't think the stock lines your face up with the sights very well,
if you pick this up and then immediately set it down and pick up a Benelli M1,
the Benelli is just obviously and easily superior.
So these never sold all that well.
They were imported into the US until 1989, when they fell under the assault weapons import prohibitions,
so that kind of killed them here in the US,
and Franchi stopped manufacturing them altogether about the year 2000, so.
Despite that, there were more of these brought into the US, and they're more accessible than
well, more accessible than the SPAS-12, and certainly more accessible than the SPAS-15,
which is a really quite difficult gun to get in the US.
There was also a Franchi SAS-12, which is kind of like,
the other, the alternative universe LAW-12. It was a pump-action only, so
the SPAS-12 did both,
the LAW-12 is semi-auto only, the SAS-12 was pump-action only.
I think the pump-action only one was even less remarkable and appealing to the market, because
it's not like we have any lack of pump-action shotguns in the US, so.
At any rate, the LAW-12 remains the most accessible of the bunch, so if you're looking for one,
this is- if you want a piece of Franchi combat shotgun hardware, this is
probably the easiest one to get into.
You can see a little bit more about this one on Rock Island's website, they have pictures, price estimate,
all of that sort of stuff,
and you can access that by way of Forgotten Weapons, which is linked in the description below.
Thanks for watching.