derringer

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An original Philadelphia Deringer made by Henry Deringer. This was the pocket pistol used by John Wilkes Booth in the Abraham Lincoln Assassination.

2 barrel Remington derringer

The term derringer is a genericized misspelling of the last name of Henry Deringer, a famous maker of small pocket pistols in the 1800s. Many copies of the original Philadelphia Deringer pistol were made by other gun makers worldwide, and the name was often misspelled; this misspelling soon became a generic term for any pocket pistol. The original Deringer pistol was a single-shot muzzleloading pistol; with the advent of cartridge firearms, pistols began to be produced in the modern form still known as a derringer.

Design

Magazine of the four-shot COP derringer patent 4,407,085

A derringer is generally the smallest usable handgun of a given caliber. They were frequently used by women, because they are easily concealable in a purse or as a stocking gun. Derringers are not repeating firearms—repeating mechanisms such as used on semi-automatic handguns or revolvers would add significant bulk to the gun, defeating the purpose. The original cartridge derringers held only a single round, usually a pinfire or rimfire .40 caliber cartridge, with the barrel pivoted sideways on the frame to allow access to the breech for reloading. The famous Remington derringer design doubled the capacity, while maintaining the compact size, by adding a second barrel on top of the first and pivoting the barrels upwards to reload. Each barrel then held one round, and a cam on the hammer alternated between top and bottom barrels. The Remington derringer was in .41 Rimfire caliber and achieved wide popularity. The .41 Rimfire bullet moved very slowly, at about 425 feet per second (a modern .45 ACP travels at 850 feet per second). It could be seen in flight, but at very close range, such as at a casino or saloon card table, it could easily kill. The Remington derringer was sold from 1866 to 1935.

Even with the advent of smaller, higher-powered cartridges made possible by the use of smokeless powder rather than the black powder used in the 1800s and before, the classic Remington design is still popular; a Remington-pattern derringer in .38 Special is still smaller than the most compact .25 ACP semiautomatic, and provides superior terminal ballistic performance to the .25 ACP. While the classic Remington design is a single action, manufacturers have also made double action derringers, including some four-shot models, with the barrels stacked in a 2 x 2 block. The COP 357 Derringer, made in Torrance, California, provided four shots of .357 Magnum in a package not much larger than a .25 ACP automatic, and was significantly more compact than a similar revolver. The COP derringer was invented by Robert Hillberg and closely resembled his earlier work on insurgency weapons.

A related design, often grouped with derringers since it fits no other standard classification, is the Semmerling pistol. It is a five-shot, .45 ACP pistol with a manual repeater: the barrel mechanism is manually pulled forward to eject the fired round, then pushed back to chamber the next round. These pistols were originally built for the United States Army, and the few available on the civilian market are highly sought after due to their unique combination of high power, large capacity, and tiny size. Another military pistol that is truly a derringer design is the FP-45 Liberator, a .45 ACP insurgency weapon dropped behind Axis lines in World War II.

See also

• .41 Rimfire Cartridge
• Garrucha
• National Arms Company
• Bond Arms Derringer Manufacture
• FP-45_Liberator
• Deer gun
• Cobray

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Derringer

• The Booth Deringer--Genuine artifact or Replica?, a report of an FBI analysis of the Booth Deringer, made after rumors that the original had been stolen and replaced with a replica.
• Derringer
• Derringer Resource website
• The Texas Defender, Bond Arms .45acp/410 Shotshell