China Makes its Own CornerShot

Shooting around corners is a pistola holy grail.  It takes almost perfect cover and concealment and puts it into a close-quarters context.  We’re not really sure how often it’s practical in real-world conditions, but we do see how the appeal is great enough to drive the ambitions of the inventors of devices that shoot around corners.

The oldest such device was probably a German accessory for the Stg.44, which was just a bent barrel with a mirror on it.  Because war isn’t terrifying enough, apparently.  It turns out such devices were impractical, inaccurate, prone to overheating, and generally more of a hassle than peeking around the corner.

Of course now we live in an age of electronics.  Gadgets orders of magnitude more powerful than the computers that filled the buildings at Bletchley Park.  And so we tackled the problem from a high-tech perspective when the CornerShot was invented.

The CornerShot’s a fine idea, although it’s limited in two ways: first of all, it’s unwieldy.  It’s a camcorder on a flapping rifle stock.  So the AngleSight got invented.

The AngleSight is an optic with a two-way mirror that lets you look through it directly or at 90 degrees, thereby letting you hold your gun sideways to shoot around corners.  It’s simple, but it’s far less cool than the digital imaging combat system SmartSight.

The SmartSight basically takes over an eyeball and hands it exactly what your rifle is pointed at.  It’s clearly the most bad-ass and complex of the bunch.  The crazy thing about these systems is that it takes a huge amount of ingenuity to invent them, and perseverance by its inventors by the buttload to get them to market, but ultimately, some Chinese firm is going to knock them off.

And not just for Airsoft lookalikes, either.  The Chinese police do a lot of business, more than any other nation, hell, more than most nations combined, and they really want devices to shoot around corners.  Shit, we have the originals made in China, how hard is it for the same companies to make them for the Chinese police?

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t Chinese inventors, either.  The Firearm Blog found some really interesting photos of a Chinese device to shoot around corners and we can’t help but be impressed by its simplicity and style.  It’s a scope attached to a periscope on a flappy stock.

Elegant, isn’t it?