I’m a member over at THR, and those guys are pretty knowledgeable about guns. This time they are wrong. The gun in your picture does look vaguely like an AMT, but only about as much as like a C96.
The AMT is a full-size automatic rifle chambered in either 7.62 NATO or 7.5mm Swiss. It is not a kid-sized gun as the piece in your picture is. The barrel on the piece in your picture is far, far too thick in relation to the rest of the gun to be an AMT. AMT’s do not have a goofy shotgun-style vent rib. The forearm is shaped vaguely like that on some AMT’s, but extends too far out along the barrel.
If it is an AMT, it’s a toy AMT or one that was treated to the 1960’s equivalent of photoshop.
Rare and valuable, eh? I remember back in the early-'80s coveting the semi-auto version. But of course I had no money.
It could be a toy AMT. I know that they made some realistic kid-sized M-16s when I was little.
Wow. Cool! I guess I was wrong about toy guns not being detailed back then.
It looks very much like a toy to me. The scope doesn’t seem right at the rear- every actual telescopic sight I’ve ever seen either has a larger “bell” at the firer’s end, or none at all- not the coloured plastic thing shown in the photo.
The ribbing on the barrel is also more consistent with a Colt Python or a shotgun, not a semi-automatic rifle, and the grip on the underside of the barrel looks like a sporterisation job. In short, I’m going for “Realistic Toy from the '60s”- look at the kid in the picture, and the lighting- it looks to me like something from a toy catalogue.
After going through my Vietnam-War era “Small Arms Of The World (10th Revised Edition)” I’ve seen nothing that completely matches the gun in the picture; The closest “Real Gun” I can find for the receiver is one of the Armalite rifles; the action on this modified AR-15 bears a reasonable resemblance to the gun on the album’s cover.
In short, the lighting in the photo, the action based on an Armalite rifle, the odd telescopic sight endpiece, the appearance of bits and pieces from other guns (such as the barrel end with flash-hider from general assault rifles, the ribbing from a shotgun, what appears to be a 10-round magazine from a sporting semi-auto, and the sporterised foregrip on the barrel) as well as the 1960s vintage of the photo would lead me to believe the gun is, in fact, a toy.
Nifty looking piece though, and certainly representative of some of the prototype arms floating around at the time, but definitely a toy and not an actual firearm, IMHO.
I have seen old military rifles with scopes that have eyepieces vaguely similar to the one depicted. Instead of a bell shaped end, there’s a tapered-off eyepiece like the one on this rifle.
A poster on Thehighroad.org said:
I had a toy rifle that looked like that in the 70’s. No idea who made the thing, but mine had, IIRC, that very “scope”.
True, but have a look at the size and the colour- it’s proportional to the rifle and the same colour, as opposed to the one of the rifle on the album cover.
Browsing through web I found some guy pictures from museum - and some Armalite prototypes are somewhat similar:
Not exact hit, for sure, and unfortunately all are left-side, but maybe they are brethren of our suspect.
And I repeat question about photos of older AAI guns. Does anybody have one? My google-fu failed. Here is AAI SBR:
http://www.securityarms.com/20010315/galleryfiles/1500/1547.htm
But it’s much later design. They started experiments with low caliber rifles in the fifties.