Real-Life Weapons Straight Out Of ‘Borderlands’

One of the appeals of Borderlands is its wacky weapons. They’re so ridiculous and over-the-top, thanks to the game’s randomized loot generator, that you can get a shotgun with a long-range scope, a pistol that sprays homing acid bullets, or a gun that yodels at you. But, of course, none of that stuff exists in reality. The real guns are even stranger.

The Fully-Automatic Grenade Firing Shotgun

Subscribing to the philosophy that there’s no kill like overkill, the Atchisson Assault Shotgun, better known as AA-12, is a fully automatic shotgun. It fires 300 rounds a minute, does in fact have grenade rounds manufactured for it, and also happens to largely be used by robots. You know, because we want robots to have a fully automatic shotgun at their disposal.

Real, Live, Homing Bullets

We couldn’t get far this list without talking about the government’s very own mad science division, DARPA, which pretty much has “making weird stuff from video games into actual weapons” as their mission statement. Like, for example, the EXACTO system. You know how snipers have to be incredibly precise with their shots? The Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordinance round would do away with that. Basically it’s a tiny little rocket in a .50 caliber rifle; you fire the bullet, keep your scope on the target, and the bullet finds said target. Actually, we wish we had this sniper rifle in more video games.

The “Second Century”

The Colt 1911 is a classic firearm; it’s what a lot of people think of when you say the word “handgun.” So, what could be better that a double-barreled version? Seriously, we’d have more to say, but that’s pretty much the sales pitch: “Get a Colt 1911, but it handles like two of them duct-taped together.” In other words, it’s a more refined bandit gun. We’d better get an explosion bonus or something.

The Astronaut Gun

Not, alas, a gun that fires astronauts, but a gun that was issued to astronauts, the TP-82 is still plenty strange. It was designed to allow cosmonauts to hunt game, signal for help, and defend themselves if they crashed, and it also had to fit a lot of uses into a small space. Essentially it’s a triple-barreled gun; the top two barrels were smoothbore and were essentially a small shotgun, while the third underneath it was a pistol. And if that weren’t strange enough for you, there was a machete in the stock.

The Knife-Pistol-Brass Knuckles

Better known as the “Apache revolver,” this strange little gun was engineered during the heyday of putting guns on swords, because the Victorian era was weird and nothing from Japanese RPGs is remotely original. It actually got its name from the French gangs that carried them during the 1800s, and were manufactured for years. Of course, the total lack of a barrel basically meant the gun part was useless at more than five feet away, but hey, there are plenty of guns in Borderlands more about the melee damage, right?

In short, reality is closer to Borderlands than you think. So we recommend against any moon-shots you might be planning in the near future.

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