The M of RWG&SD2 Exhibit 2.01: The Ladies Home Companion

• Dates: 1991-present
• Description: A very weird looking pistol
• Significant Figures: Wayne and Sylvia Daniels (Cobray), Hilton R. Walker

The Museum of Right-Wing Gadgets and Sundry Devices could easily fill its halls with firearms and not just to keep the cat happy. However, to prevent the place from becoming nothing but another weapons museum, exhibits of weapons are limited to those of a particularly seminal or curious nature.

The Cobray Ladies Home Companion is clearly a weapon. It looks like you could use it as a club and has an almost steampunk aesthetic as if it has been designed for comical gangsters in some weird animation.

It’s a wind-up gun. Bullets can be loaded into the big cylinder one by one. Each time you add a bullet you wind the winder on the front of the drum. Pull the trigger and the drum move round, I guess because of a spring?

Given its name, it isn’t the most feminine of firearms but the company behind it were not a marketing geniuses. It’s possible that the more delicate-sounding name was due to the more serious misstep the arms company had made with this gun’s predecessor.

Prior to the Ladies Home Companion was the conceptually similar Street Sweeper shotgun. It featured the same idea of a mechanical drum that would allow somebody to blast lots of people with a series of shots. The name, with its implications of mass carnage, drew a lot of attention towards what was apparently a very poorly designed weapon. The Street Sweeper was classed by the US Government in 1994 as a “destructive device”, a more highly regulated class of weapon which made it commercial unviable. However, the Ladies Home Companion appears to have been commercial unviable even in the US not due to regulation but just by being a weird looking thing with no obvious market.

The Street Sweeper itself was a US version of an earlier weapon from South Africa. An ex-Rhodesian inventor called Hilton R. Walker created the Armsel Stryker as an anti-riot weapon. So even by the dubious standards of notable firearms, not a great background for what would eventually evolve into the Ladies Home Companion.

Museum Scores

• Gadgetyness: 10/10 It has little key at the front for winding it up
• Ideologicalness: 10/10 It’s a kind of riot gun but with a misogynistic marketing spin
• Actualness: 10/10 These were actually made and sold and (in the US) you can buy them online where the sellers boast about them being the worst gun ever invented