Every year, tens of thousands of people descend upon Las Vegas for SHOT Show to see the latest tactical AR-15s, precision bolt guns, and duty pistols. If you’re like me, you venture away from the major manufacturer booths and head down into the basement or the far corners of the Supplier Showcase to find the best weird guns of SHOT.
SR-3M
The SR-3M is a faithful American recreation of a rare Russian specialized assault rifle. The original was a compact derivative of the AS Val used by Russian special forces. This gun never reached the U.S. market. The team at Roswell Rifle Works took on the challenge of reverse-engineering the design, producing a 95% dimensional match.
The cartridge and rifle are similar to .300 Blackout and the micro ARs that chamber it. It’s a short, sweet, and mean suppressed powerhouse. The gun chambers the oddball and un-American 9x39mm round.
The gun fires heavy, subsonic projectiles from an incredibly small footprint. Despite the caliber’s obscurity, rounds are pricey but not out of this world at roughly 80 cents a pop, making it pretty close to .300 Blackout in price.
Why It’s weird
It’s a forbidden fruit brought to American shores. It looks like an AK that was left in the dryer too long. The combination of its specialized 9mm rifle caliber, which uses a necked-out casing to hold a massive bullet, and its unique manual of arms makes it one of the most mechanically weird offerings to hit the floor at SHOT.
GearHead Gunsmith Tensei
The Tensei is a passion project from a one-man shop called Gearhead Gunsmith. He’s dedicated to recreating the Japanese Nambu Type 100 submachine gun as a semi-auto rifle.
Born from a love of video games and a background in machining, the Gearhead Gunsmith developed this non-NFA, closed-bolt PCC that’s both weird and fascinating.
To keep it from requiring a mortgage to buy, it uses common components like AR-15 fire control groups, firing pins, and ejectors, while feeding from cheap PPS-43 magazines. The gun is robust, heavy, and you feel like you can use the bayonet without breaking the gun.
You can leave it in its close-to-historical design, or you can choose threaded barrels, bayonet lugs, or even integrated optics and accessory rails. At $1,250, it’s not cheap, but it’s also a small-batch gun made nowhere else.
Why It’s weird
Any PCC with a traditional wood stock and side feeding magazine is going to be weird. We just don’t see that in modern rifle design. The fact that someone is replicating a somewhat obscure Japanese SMG is enough to set off the weird-o meter.
At the same time, it’s using American parts from American weapons to simplify production and improve reliability in the closed-bolt format.
B&T KH9 B
The B&T KH9 series are heavily inspired by the rare and weird Italian Sites Spectre M4, inheriting its unique double-action capability. Built with B&T’s legendary precision, it features a closed-bolt blowback system, a folding stock, and a modular magwell that can be swapped to accommodate different magazines.
The B in the new KH9 B must stand for Bizon. It uses a Bizon-style magazine. It’s a round drum-like helical magazine that holds 50 rounds of 9mm.
This drum allows it to hold an entire box of ammo in a spiral pattern without sticking insanely far down, like an extended magazine. It maintains a crazy slim profile overall which would make it a great bag gun.
It retains the KH9’s Sites-inspired DA/SA trigger group and linear hammer. This gives you an extra layer of safety if you want it. You’ll have to understand one thing about me: I love DA/SA guns.
Make a DA/SA PCC/Subgun, and you have me drooling.
Why It’s weird
It’s a Swiss Bizon. B&T took one of the most mechanically unique gun designs in the world and combined it with one of the most complicated helical magazines.
The result is a gun that looks like a prototype from a futuristic police force. It would be perfect in Robocop. This thing has weird written all over it.
KelTec PR 3AT
The PR-3AT is the latest creation of the mad scientists from KelTec, the undisputed king of weird firearms design.
KelTec blended the ultra-compact nature of the original P3AT with the rotary-barrel technology of the PR57. Like the PR 57, it is a magazine-free pistol, opting for a fixed internal magazine rather than a traditional detachable box magazine.
By removing the detachable magazine, KelTec was able to keep an extremely small and thin gun that allows for a 13+1 capacity.
They do this in a frame that is thinner and lighter than almost any other micro-compact on the market. It is fed via 7-round stripper clips through the top of the action. There are 13+1 and 10+1 options available.
The gun features a smooth double-action trigger, and a functional slide release. They even have an optics-ready variant developed in partnership with Viridian Optics.
Why It’s weird
In an era where every manufacturer is chasing the stack-and-a-half detachable magazine, KelTec went backward to go forward. George Kellgren founded a company called Grendel that produced the Grenel 10, a pocket .380 pistol with a fixed magazine fed by stripper clips.
Mix a fixed magazine with a rotary barrel in a pocket pistol, and we get something truly weird.
The PR 3AT is a weird gun that defies modern expectations, prioritizing a thin profile and deep concealment over a standard reload.
Blecher BrashZero
The BrashZero has a lofty goal. It aims to be a functional, practical, caseless firearm. While it uses standard 5.56 mm projectiles, it eliminates the brass casing.
This allows for a 5.56 weapon that is under 15 inches long with a 7.5-inch barrel. It’s the most compact 5.56 platform on the market.
Caseless guns have never worked that well, and this one is sealed in a box, so I can’t confirm anything about reliability and design. It’s still a prototype, so it still needs work before it’s a finished product.
I’m no genius, and the Blecher website has a lot of engineering talk, but I can say the system uses a long-stroke gas piston. The magazine holds your projectile, powder, and primer. Once loaded, you have to finish the magazine before it can be removed.
For safety purposes, the powder reservoir is physically insulated from the hot barrel and bolt. The bolt only touches the specific powder charge being fired at that moment. This eliminates the risk of cook-offs during high-volume fire.
Why It’s weird
Do I have to answer this question? It’s a bullpup, long-stroke gas piston pistol that uses caseless ammo. It’s utterly bizarre in every way it could possibly be.
It looks like a prop from a sci-fi movie, but it operates with a simple charging handle and trigger, keeping the manual of arms familiar. The internals do something almost no other firearm has ever successfully done.
Getting Weird At Shot
If you stick to the mainstream booths of SHOT you’ll never escape polymer frame duty guns, high-speed ARs, and tactical shotguns. Those are all great, but if you want to convince yourself the industry hasn’t surrendered to the black plastic status quo, hit the dark corners for weird stuff.
These guns aren’t safe bets, but they make the show a helluva lot more interesting.
