Ever see those movies depicting gangsters from the Prohibitition era, where they uncase their submachine guns from musical instrument cases and let the “G” men have it? Is that all just bullsh!t or what!
BANJO CASES!!! Banjo cases! What the hell kind of grade Z movies cursed your formative years?
It’s VIOLEN CASE, VIOLEN CASE.
And the answere is no.
ShitFuckPissGodDamnButtLickItAllToCunnilingualHell
I get to be first in line for an obvious joke and hose it all up.
Violan should be violin.
Answere should be answer.
Damn wine. This is it. This is the last time I drink a whole bottle at one shot, today.
My WAG - how else would they walk around in public carrying a sub-machine gun? The machine-gun-toting gangster of the future could just carry it under their coats, but they were too big back in the 20’s and 30’s for that.
This is the last time I drink a whole bottle at one shot, today.
Yeah, good idea, I wouldn’t do it again today either. But there’s always tomorrow…
Violan should be violin.
No, VIOLEN should be violin. 
I think the violin case is a hollywood myth. A Thompson will not fit in a violin case and I have my doubts that it will even fit in a viola case. I’ve seen a faux violin case but even then the gun has the buttstock removed. I’ll see if I can dig up a picture.
Well, I was goiing to write “violin case”, but having shot a submachine gun, I knew that it was too large to fit in a violin case.
I think the real question is: can you really fit a rocket launcher into a guitar case?
Yeah, that’s the problem with these Twenties Jazz-era bands: too much sax and violins.
I’ve shot Thompsons a couple of times and they are fairly large.
BTW, A friend of mine does have a short barrelled folding stock AK-47 in a violin case. He also built what he calls the micro-CAR - a short barreled telescoping stock CAR-15 that fits, with the upper and lower separated, in a normal looking briefcase.
Take a look at this photo of a Thompson machine gun in its case.
It’s not really a violin case, but it looks like one. Hence the confusion.
The Thompson submachine gun was popular with Prohibition-era gangsters for a variety of reasons:
- It used a readily available variety of ammunition.
- It’s an excellent short-range weapon with loads of stopping power. Its accuracy at long range is a joke, but whatever you hit with it goes down and stays there.
- It was originally classified as a handgun, legally speaking. Yup. This made it about as easy to BUY as a handgun, and Chicago’s mobsters bought them by the carload.
I have seen photos of Thompson submachine guns carried in musical instrument cases – not the ones pictured in the above link, but in a case that looks very much like a violin case, but slightly bigger. The forward box magazine was not in place, by the way, but was in the case alongside the gun. Presumably, you’d pop the case open, yank the gun and magazine out, slap the magazine into place, and start blazing away.
I assumed that it was an instrument case originally meant for some other stringed instrument of some sort… and that this was originally because a buncha guys in pinstriped suits carrying violin cases would be taken for a band, not a gang, so to speak.
At least until the movies got hold of the idea…
Well, you could carry one around in a cello case, but that would be rather unwieldly, as would trying to play the cello while in a marching band.
Please note that is a minature gun and the case is less than 9" long.
I can see why they were classified as finger guns.
my uncle played violin so badly that when he opened the case people were hoping it was a machinegun.
I used to keep my AR-15 in a guitar case.
I thought it was funny.
(No, I never took it out of the house like that.)
Hi, all. This is my first post here. Being new to the site I have been reading many of the old threads.
Back in the day, tommy guns were sold with carrying cases (or maybe you had to buy them separately) much like hunters have carrying cases for their guns. Because in the early days so few people had a ever seen a Tommy gun and its cylindrical feed is so distinctive, you could walk around with one its carrying case and no one suspected it was a gun. The curious might even have supposed that it was some unfamiliar type of musical instument because the similarity to musical instrument cases. But that similarity did indeed spawn the misconception that they were carried in musical instrument cases.
I was thinking pf posting this question myself—the other night I saw a woman on the subway carrying a violin case, and people were eyeing her nervously. The 80-year-old supposition lives on!
In the early Sixties, Baseball Digest carried a short item about Earl Averill, Sr.–famous for breaking Dizzy Dean’s toe with a hard-hit grounder in the 1937 All-Star Game–causing a serious scene when he was boarding a plane to go to an old-timers’ game. He insisted on carrying his own bat; the trouble was he insisted on bringing it onto the plane in a gun case! :eek: