The Tippmann Armory Gatling 9mm Gun

Origin Story

The beating heart of this dream-machine spawns from Dr. Richard Gatling’s 19th-century tactical paradigm-shifter. Richard Jordan Gatling was a physician who never technically practiced medicine. He was a professional inventor who made and lost several fortunes before dying at his daughter’s home at the age of 84. In addition to the multi-barreled firearm bearing his name, Dr. Gatling also invented a screw propeller for steamboats, a rice-sowing machine, an improved toilet, a novel type of bicycle, a device for steam-cleaning wool and several other fascinating contrivances.

Oddly, Gatling imagined his fast-firing weapon as a life-saving response to the horrific scourge of disease during the American Civil War. He once opined, “It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine — a gun — which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent, supersede the necessity of large armies and, consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished.” How sweet. I doubt he had any idea how far his eponymous 19th-century death-dealing whirligig might go.

Gatling based his gun design upon that of his mechanical seed planter. The Gatling gun first drew breath in 1862, but the weapon only saw very limited service during the Civil War. George Armstrong Custer famously left three Model 1866 .50-caliber Gatling guns in the rear when his 7th Cavalry got wiped out at the Little Big Horn. In 1893 Dr. Gatling affixed an electric motor to one of his guns and coaxed a 3,000-round-per-minute rate of fire out of the thing.

In 1963 General Electric revived the idea with the 7.62x51mm Minigun, so named because it fired a rifle-caliber round much smaller than the 20mm version feeding the M61 Vulcan aircraft cannon. The U.S. military consumed some 10,000 Miniguns during the Vietnam War. In 1990 Dillon Aero began work on an improved version of the design that is now a common fixture across all American armed services as well as dozens of foreign militaries.