An Honest-to-Gosh Cannon
Machine guns have been around since the Spanish-American War. Multi-barrel weapons, such as the Gatling, although differing functionally, have had a similar effect and have been around even longer, having been demonstrated during the American Civil War. And the king of them all is the great Ma Deuce, the Browning M2 .50 caliber, that chucks out a 750-grain slug at 2,800 feet per second. There are several commercial rifles chambered in that big bruiser, from the Barrett M82 to the Armalite AR-50.
But what if you wanted something more? Suppose you belong to the “go big or go home” school of thought, where can you go from there, from the big .50 BMG?
Well, there’s the 20mm cannon round. Mind you, this is more a family of rounds than a specific cartridge, with 20mm cannons having been used in anti-vehicle, anti-air, aircraft armaments, and other applications since World War 2, by pretty much all the combatants. The most common American 20mm round is the 20mm Vulcan, with a muzzle velocity like the .50BMG, around 2,800 to 3,300 feet per second – but with a massive, almost 80 caliber slug, over twice the weight of the .50 caliber round at 1,600 grains. This isn’t a machine gun cartridge, but rather an autocannon round, and as such, the explosive/incendiary ammo and the weapons that shoot it aren’t readily available for American civilians.
But what if someone made a rifle for this huge round? Say, a bolt-action rifle?
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Well, someone has.
The Anzio 20mm Cannon
A company named Anzio Ironworks has done what many of us can only dream of – they have built a 20mm, bolt-action, repeating rifle that fires the American 20mm Vulcan round, the same round used in the Department of War’s famous 20mm Vulcan cannon. This is a perfectly awesome piece of shooting iron, weighing in at 60 to 130 pounds, depending on barrel length and so forth. It’s 80 inches from muzzle to buttplate; 96 ½ inches is the length when the suppressor is attached. And, yes, one can get a suppressor for a 20mm rifle. The standard barrel length is 49 inches. It is, as stated, a bolt-action repeater with a 3-round detachable box magazine.
This is the first modern rifle with a bore diameter larger than .50 caliber made in the United States in 80 years. And why not? Think of the applications: You could drop a good-sized tree with a couple of rounds. It would be overkill for anything short of an armored personnel carrier, but it’s as I’ve always said, you can shoot little stuff with a big gun, but you can’t shoot big stuff with a little gun. The Anzio 20mm is about as big as they come; in fact, for the civilian market, they just don’t come any bigger.
That ammo, though…
The Ammo
The 20mm Vulcan ammunition for the Anzio is likewise amazing. The 20mm Vulcan can hit 3,300 feet per second out of the Anzio’s 49-inch tube, with an effective range of 5,000 yards. This is yielding almost 40,000 foot-pounds of energy at the muzzle, according to the best numbers I could find, run through a commie-metric to American freedom measurements convertor – yes, over 20 tons. That’s a lot of power.
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Here’s the catch: You can’t easily buy this ammo. Setting aside the cost (in the range of $75-100 per shot), what 20mm ammo you can buy is pretty tightly restricted. You can buy non-explosive or solid-core rounds; remember, this is a cannon cartridge. But you can’t buy high-explosive or incendiary rounds, or tracers, or armor-piercing rounds, as they are classified under the National Firearms Act as destructive devices. That’s mildly disappointing, but when you consider the likely civilian use for a 20mm rifle, it’s hard to see a situation where a 20mm solid-core slug backed up by 20 tons of muzzle energy isn’t, as Robert Ruark would have said, “enough gun.”
Why Would You Want One?Well, obviously, because it’s awesome.
I mean, if you were somehow able to go back to the Cretaceous and hunt a sauropod dinosaur that’s as long as a football field and weighs as much as five or six diesel locomotives, this would be the gun for the job. Forget tyrannosaurs, with this, you can hunt titanosaurs. Nothing in the history of this planet can stand up to a 20mm cannon.
Assuming you don’t have a time machine and a hankering for a few tons of sauropod cutlets, what can you use a monster like this for? It’s illegal to hunt anywhere in the United States with a 20mm cannon, and with good reason; hitting even an Alaskan moose with one of these would destroy a lot of edible meat.
Do you go in for long-range target shooting? The Anzio will certainly reach out and touch somebody. The 20mm Vulcan round has an effective range that can extend past 3,000 yards. That’s well over a mile and a half. That’s farther than I want to run these days, at least not without stopping for a rest, a drink, and maybe a good night’s sleep. Walking’s another story, but one can’t spend all day walking back and forth to a target backstop that may well be in the next county.
Do you live in one of these rural areas where you may have a neighbor who has every car he’s ever owned over the last 40 years still parked out back of his house? Simple solution: Offer to go halves on the 20mm ammo with him and spend a happy afternoon blasting them to scrap metal. A 20mm slug will probably pass through the entire row of Packards, Studebakers, and Hudsons that the old guy has parked in the back pasture.
Of course, the best reasons for owning something like this, assuming you can afford it – I can’t, not without having my wife on the phone with a divorce lawyer the moment she saw the price tag - is simple: Because it suits you.
Sometimes, you know, you don’t really need a reason to want something. The Anzio 20mm cannon may be one of those times.
