I love seeking out the dark corners of the gun company catalogs. So many guns get forgotten, and today, we are looking at some of Mossberg’s Forgotten Weapons. Mossberg has been alive since 1919 and is one of the longest family-owned gun businesses out there. Seriously, I was at SHOT talking about shotguns with a fellow at the Mossberg booth when I looked at his badge and realized I was speaking with Mr. Mossberg himself, the CEO of the company.
Mossberg’s bread and butter are shotguns, but they’ve produced a wide variety of guns. Plenty are forgotten, like who can name all of the bolt-action shotguns they produced? What about the Blaze .22LR AK rifle? While there might be plenty of forgotten weapons, I’m going to stick to five that I think are both interesting and largely forgotten.
The Brownie
The first firearm Mossberg ever produced was not a shotgun, but a handgun called the Brownie. Oscar Mossberg had some experience with multi-barreled pistols and had designed several in his firearms career. When he struck out to create O.F. Mossberg and Sons, he designed and sold the Brownie. While this is largely a forgotten weapon, Mossberg usually shows one of the originals at SHOT.
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The Brownie is a four-shot, four-barreled pistol with a double-action design that features a rotating firing pin. The gun broke open shotgun-style for loading and unloading, and a small piece of metal was used to remove spent casings. The gun sold for five dollars and advertised itself as semi-automatic. Compared to actual semi-auto pocket pistols, the Brownie was downright cheap.
Mossberg 200K
Mossberg’s website has a company timeline listing its firearms over the years. If you went by that timeline, you’d think the Mossberg 500 was their first shotgun. In reality, the Mossberg 200K was their first pump shotgun. It didn’t look like a traditional pump shotgun. The 200K looked more like their bolt-action designs.
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The shotgun used a two-round magazine that was removable. It’s an odd shotgun, and most models featured those old poly-choke designs. The gun had a front and rear sight and a wood stock setup. It’s odd, but it definitely qualifies as a forgotten weapon.
Mossberg Pro-38
The Mossberg Pro-38 was a five-shot .38 Special revolver that Mossberg first revealed in 1980. The Pro-38 was made by a company called U.S. Arms DIV. of A.I.G. Inc. It seemed that Mossberg purchased the company and put them to work making handguns, specifically revolvers. The Pro-38 would be Mossberg’s first revolver and was fairly standard.
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It’s a small, concealable revolver that was typical of a snub-nose. It appeared to be roughly J-frame sized and had an exposed hammer. It looked like Mossberg planned to make 2- and 3-inch varieties. The thing is, these guns only appeared in a 1980 Mossberg catalog and never saw the light of day. It’s unclear why, but that’s what happened.
The Compact Cruiser Series
The Mossberg Cruiser series are the famed pistol-grip guns. Mossberg does branding well, and the Cruiser series are fairly well known; they might also be called the Persuader at times. Traditionally, it’s an 18.5-inch barrel on a pistol-grip-only shotgun platform. In 2016, they introduced the Mossberg Compact Cruiser series.
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Mossberg shortened the barrels extensively to 10.25 inches for the 590A1 model and to 7.5 inches for the 7.5-inch model. These were AOWs and fell into the same category as guns like the Serbu Super Shorty. They featured folding vertical grips because they were too short to accommodate standard pumps. Mossberg produced very few of these guns, and they have become fairly collectible and largely forgotten.
Mossberg 590DA
In 2000, Mossberg introduced the 590DA. DA stands for double-action, and Mossberg used a double-action-only style trigger in this line of shotguns. The thinking was that most cops were carrying DA/SA or DA pistols in this era. This would make it easy for a cop to transition from their handgun to their revolver.
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The 590DA’s trigger was long and rolled a bit like a revolver. It’s an interesting take, but these guns seemed to be exceedingly rare. I doubt they were all that popular, and it seemed like a solution in search of a problem.
Forgotten Weapons of Mossberg
Mossberg has produced a lot of guns. They might be most well known for their shotguns, but they’ve done a bit of everything. This includes some interesting experiments and dives into some odd categories. I’ll give it to them, they seem willing to give anything a try, even when it doesn’t work out.
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