I just watched some old episodes of “Wanted: Dead or Alive” where Steve McQueen’s character sports a sawed-off Winchester. The only advantage I see it having over a pistol is it could fire more robust ammo. Otherwise it seems to have given up the benefits of a rifle (long range accuracy due to long barrel, high capacity magazine also due [I believe] to long barrel), while also forsaking the benefits of a pistol (lighter weight, easy one-hand operation). So it strikes me as a Hollywood creation with no practical value.
Am I missing something? In the real world would something like this be worth using?
just my opinion, but no there is no advantage to this firearm at all. Less ammunition, poorer accuracy and more recoil using rifle ammunition than the rifle from which it was cut down while still requiring two hands to operate. It is also pretty awkward to hold and aim while trying to use the sights. Firing any weapon other than a shotgun from the hip accurately is virtually impossible for the average user.
My 9mm Beretta M9A3 holds four times the rounds, can be operated with one hand and I would bet I could fire it much more accurately
In many 1950s westerns, the gun was pretty much the only thing that differentiated one hero from another.
Wanted Dead or Alive featured the sawed off rifle
The Rifleman used a big-ring that allowed him to fire his rifle nearly continuously
Yancy Derringer used- not just a derringer - a fancy four-barrel derringer
Not to be outdone, Bat Masterson had an emergency derringer mounted in his belt buckle
Wyatt Earp went the other way, using a standard .45 with a 12" long barrel
Shotgun Slade preferred an over-under combination 12-gauge shotgun and .32 caliber rifle
Few if any of them would have provided much advantage in real life. Wyatt Earp’s .45 Buntline special would have been a real pain in a quick-draw showdown.
While I certainly wouldn’t have chosen to use a mare’s leg, I can suggest a few advantages. The .44-40 achieved much higher velocity in a mare’s leg than in a revolver, due to the longer (9") barrel and the absence of any cylinder gap. It could be fired with a two-handed grip, if desired. And it actually could be fired from the shoulder, though Josh Randall usually fired from the hip. OTOH, I don’t believe that the original rifles used in the series even had sights. In a sense, it was a precursor to some modern close-quarters carbines.
I’m not sure that it’s helpful to compare the (purportedly) 19th century mare’s leg to a 20th century Beretta semi-auto, though I agree that the Beretta would certainly come out on top.
I have not watched the show, but does he wear that as a belt or a Sam Browne? There’s not a good way to wear a rifle on a belt, and doubly so when riding a horse.
I suspect the rule of cool accounts for 90% of it, but also the European dragoons were light cavalry that often used shorter weapons, like short blunderbusses.
Huh. Apparently, the mares leg is a real thing
I’ve the Win 1894 in 30-30, and it has a surprising amount of recoil for a medium power cartridge. I suspect, because it’s a light weight carbine. Don’t know about the 44-40, but pushing that much lead, I bet it has a bit of a kick too.
Paladin (little known fact, his first name was Wire) carried the more practical Colt SAA Cavalry model with the 7.5" barrel. He also carried a hidden Remington Derringer behind his belt buckle.
I have an 1894 AE in .357 mag and, when compared to a S&W 686 8" shooting the same cartridge, the 1894 has significantly less felt recoil and much greater bullet velocity. Of course, the 1894 has a 16" barrel as opposed to the 9" mare’s leg, but I believe the improvement would be comparable.
One other advantage occurred to me. The mare’s leg had a 6-round magazine, so one could load 7 rounds (one in the chamber) with reasonable safety. (I have no idea if there was a tang safety on the original or not, so I may be wrong.) It was a general practice to load most contemporary revolvers with one chamber empty and rest the hammer on that chamber, limiting them to 5 rounds before reloading.
I had a Mare’s Leg in 45 Colt for a while. Bought it from a friend who wanted something else at the time. Fun to shoot, but that was it for me.
The “advantage” in the old west, could use the same caliber in both pistol and semi rifle. Many already did this of course as there were lot’s of pistol and rifles sharing the same caliber.
The picture in the OP looks like a Winchester Model 1892, a very popular firearm in movie and TV Westers. The cartridges in the photo look like they’re .32-20 Winchester, which was very common round back then. I have a Winchester Model 92 rifle (not carbine) made in 1897 that is chambered for that round. The recoil is very light, and there were some handguns chambered for it. It probably has about as much recoil as a .38 Special.
ETA: Yeah, a .30-30 Win has quite a kick. But the '92 wasn’t chambered for it.
Mare’s Leg is not an authentic rifle from the 1800s. It was created for Wanted: Dead or Alive by cutting down a Winchester Model 1892 lever-action rifle.
There are numerous manufacturers making Mare’s Legs these days. Ironically, the original version (cutting down a Winchester 1892) is illegal in many places due to laws that prevent people from making sawed-off shotguns and such, but the purpose-built reproductions are legal in many of those same areas since they are classified as “lever action pistols” and are regulated as a modern handgun. You can build one from scratch, but you can’t cut down a long rifle, even though in both cases you end up with exactly the same thing.
The success of reproductions and variants has led to the term now being used generically for any lever-action rifle with a shortened stock and barrel, so that it ends up with roughly the same size stock and barrel as the original movie version. It doesn’t even have to be based on the Winchester 1892 these days, just something reasonably similar (mainly, lever-action).
In the original show, the bullets on Steve McQueen’s belt were .45-70, although the actual gun was chambered for .44-40.
A .45-70 is a powerful cartridge. So my guess is that they were portraying the Mare’s leg as a very powerful quasi-pistol. It was also a fairly accurate cartridge, and the Mare’s leg has a longer barrel than most pistols, so it would have been pretty accurate, as a guess.
For an individual bounty hunter without a lot of cash, there may be a rational reason to modify the rifle like that. Guns are expensive. Availability at the time would have been driven to the towns linked to supply chain from the manufacturing base. If you didn’t have immediate access to a pistol a relatively small and portable mod of a rifle to fill the role might make sense. There is an even stronger motivation if you have access to a rifle to mod that was damaged and not worth as much, if anything, as is. Once you have been using it there can be some inertia to keep using what you have developed muscle memory for.
It clearly has an advantage over no pistol at all. The best is the enemy of the good enough.
As I understand it, the functional advantage of a shorter barrel is to make a weapon more useful in short range combat.
With a shotgun, it’s to get a wider spray and this was used, as example, in WWI for trench warfare.
With a carbine or shortened rifle, the goal would be to have greater maneuverability when ducking around corners, trees, or whatever all else. It’s a compromise on punch but still better than a handgun.
I could also envision a person shortening their gun for ease and comfort of carry.
An actor, for example, might be asked to carry a weapon around, strapped to him in a way that isn’t particularly comfortable but that looks cool. He might subsequently ask that the weapon be modified to be shorter so that it is at least possible for him to move around the set without looking like a robot.
And while we might scoff at that actor, I suspect that real soldiers have done sillier things in the name of comfort. Patton, as I recall, was big on punishing people for not wearing their helmets.
A gun isn’t a spherical cow in a vacuum. It has to conform to a lot of different pressures beyond accuracy and force.
Can that work in reverse? Like you say, it’d lack a rifle’s long-range accuracy and a pistol’s lighter weight; but could you build one that has better long-range accuracy than a pistol, and a lighter weight than a rifle?
It seems pretty clear to me that it was based on the Obrez from WW1, which was a Mosin-Nagant that was cut down so it could be hidden under a trenchcoat for all your partisan needs.
Occasionally around the waist, with the gun hanging down along the outside his thigh, but it seems more often buckled into a circle and slung over his shoulder, rather like a lady’s handbag.
