Combination guns, or guns featuring multiple barrels, have a long history in Europe, most notably in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. But these guns are a little bit different than your over-under 12 gauge. Primarily used for hunting, combination guns can have as many as two, three, four, or even five barrels, which may be any mixture of shotgun, rimfire and center-fire barrels.
Join National Firearms Museum senior curator Doug Wicklund as he takes a look at a German vierling (from the German word vier, meaning four), which has, as you would probably expect, four barrels. Among this gun’s four barrels are two smoothbores, one .22 rimfire, and a center-fire barrel. Made sometime around 1900 in Berlin, this piece gave some hunter his full arsenal in a single gun.
