Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Morphy
Auction Company taking a look at a Deer Gun.
This is the CIA's successor to the Liberator pistol.
So, the whole concept of this was to produce a very, very cheap,
very, very simple pistol that could be air dropped
to resistance groups and insurgents
and anybody that the CIA wanted to very covertly arm with a pretty lame gun.
So really the idea is someone has this and they use it to shoot an enemy soldier and take that guy's real gun.
Now the idea for this came up in the 1950s, and basically someone got the idea of
"Hey you know that Liberator thing, like that really cheap pistol that's really simple, that we can just drop to people?
We could make use of some of those in some of the places where the CIA's working now. Like can we get some of those?"
Well, no, they couldn't. Because pretty much the entire stockpile of Liberators
(of which a million had been made, give or take, and a tiny faction of that actually used),
the vast majority of them were just scrapped in 1946 and '47.
And so by the time the CIA got around to thinking that that might be kind of a useful thing to have, they were all gone.
So, they looked into, well, what would be involved in doing it again from scratch.
And they come up with a completely different design. So the Liberator had been designed for mass production
by GM, who had a lot of experience with stamping, this was from like their head lamp division I think.
And the gun was designed to be cheaply stamped out of a couple of pieces, you know, two halves, spot weld them together.
Well ... another way that you can make really cheap bulk products, guns or anything else, is casting.
And so in the '50s the CIA ended up going to a guy named Russel Moore
who ran a company called American Machine & Foundry, AMF.
He had done a bunch of small arms sorts work for the CIA, covert, sneaky stuff,
and he figured that, yeah, you could make a cast aluminium, single shot, 9mm pistol
and you could make them for, like, $3.95 a piece, 4 bucks a pop.
Not quite as cheap as the Liberator, but hey, it's a little later, inflation's done some work.
A little more expensive, but still a very cheap gun.
They went with 9mm because by the 1950s this was a much more common calibre outside of the United States than .45 ACP.
And so this is what they ended up making.
Unfortunately this Deer Gun is in pretty poor condition, it's been used and abused, and it is not functional any more.
But I can show you how it originally worked.
The idea was you had a compartment for a couple of cartridges in the grip,
very similar to the Liberator in that aspect actually.
And then you had a manually cocked striker, and the barrel threads in.
So, the threads on this are a little gunked up right now, it should thread all the way in like that.
But this one doesn't want to go much farther than that.
Anyway, you would unscrew the barrel, you would manually insert a cartridge into the barrel,
you would then screw it onto the gun.
You would then pull this back (and it's frozen up unfortunately), you would pull this back, that cocks it,
and then your trigger here of course fires it.
Now there was one extra little accessory, you may notice there is a little trough for a sight,
just barely, on top of the gun. That's just cast into it.
The one extra accessory was a front sight that clipped onto the barrel, and it was dual purpose,
it also served as a safety lock.
So you would clip it onto the striker back here, and it would prevent the striker from actually dropping.
... that way you could carry the gun with a round in there, so you didn't have to unscrew the thing,
go through that whole process, if you wanted to use it.
All would you have to do is pull the little cap off, snap it onto there as a front sight,
if you even wanted that, and then that unlocked the striker and allowed it to fire.
There are no markings whatsoever on these guns, and that's intentional. They aren't even serialised.
There is a little bit of grip checkering down here, and that was built into the aluminium casting
So the idea was to make these very, very simple, a minimal amount of machining.
Some of these were made with smoothbore barrels, and some with rifled barrels.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, there was an ejector rod in the grip,
so that gave you something to punch out an empty case should the case decide to stick.
When these were officially put into CIA inventory, they were given the stock number of 1395-H00-9108.
So if we have any archival folks who want to do your own delving into the gun, good luck, that's the number that you need to use.
There is of course one of the classic questions on something like this is, is it actually worth while?
You know, was this a good idea? Well, this thing weighs 12 ounces, it cost the US government $300 in something like 1962.
... Could they have done better than a 12 ounce single-shot gun for $300?
Yes, they absolutely could have, frankly, they could have got way more effective
... results by dropping basically dropping small compact Colt or Smith & Wesson revolvers,
or revolvers from any other manufacturer, but I think some of this
comes to they want something deniable and unmarked. OK, fine.
And I think part of it also comes down to the insular nature of some of the intelligence organisations
who kind of get an idea and run with it, even though it may not actually be the most practical thing out there, so.
Now these were produced, although never in actually substantially large number.
Moore got a contract from the government to manufacture 1,000 of the guns, for which he was paid $300,000.
And if you are good at math you may realise that that is a little more that $4 a piece, that's $300 a piece.
And the reason for this is that this was an initial contract to set up all of the tooling
and a production line, and subsequent production of the gun would be far cheaper.
And that makes sense, he wasn't bilking the government, that's how this sort of thing works,
you pay a lot of money to produce a casting die, or a casting mould,
and then it's very cheap to make a whole lot of guns out of it, but you need that initial investment.
So they put in that initial investment, they made 1,000 of the guns, and then that was it. There were no further ones.
So, many of these have since been destroyed, but there's not really not any good information
on exactly how many survived, or what they were used for.
The CIA has rejected all Freedom Of Information Act requests asking about uses of the Deer Gun.
And so there's a small handful of them that has snuck out of government property one way or another.
And this is one of the very few. Unfortunately it is in pretty rough condition,
but to be honest, this is the first time that I have even seen a Deer Gun in person.
There are very few of them out there, so it's a very cool thing for anyone who is interested in
the history of the Cold War, Vietnam, covert intelligence agencies, any of that sort of stuff.
The Deer Gun is this really cool little artefact.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. If you'd like to see more details on this,
or any of the other cool stuff they have here at Morphys, check out their auction catalogue.
You can find that through their web site, which you'll have to find on your own
because YouTube does not allow me to put a link to it in the description text. So, best of luck with that.
Thanks for watching.