The 7 Most Stupidly Overpowered Hunting Weapons

7 .577 Tyrannosaur Rounds

The .577 Tyrannosaur round is, well, let's just say they don't name something "the T-Rex" because of its subtly engineered grace:

It's a bullet so large that you can't actually use it. Here's a clip of people trying to fire it:

About the fifth time a loaded rifle goes hurtling out of a man's hands and careening around a roomful of people, you get the feeling this might not be entirely safe.

But hey, it's still a fine weapon: After all, the problem isn't that it doesn't kill what you're shooting at, just that it quite possibly kills you and all of your friends in the process. It's kind of the same process as a honeybee leaving its stinger -- just replace the stinger with high explosives and the honeybee with four drunken idiots.

The round was originally designed to stop the headlong charges of big game, but we'll let this review speak to its effectiveness there: "It is not at all clear that will kill an elephant or a buffalo or a hippo any better than a well placed hit from a 470, and, of course, it will not do anything with a badly placed hit except annoy the recipient."

So basically, the Tyrannosaur round is only for dipshits who need to overcompensate for something more than they need working arms to shield their faces from angry bears, or else it's for expert hunters who have become so jaded by their excessive prowess that they feel the need to handicap themselves. Possibly literally.

6 Shadow Shield

The Shadow Shield is a new kind of blind -- a camouflaged shelter that allows hunters to get close enough to their targets to fire shots. But the Shadow Shield takes that concept a bit further, in that it is to game what the Predator's cloaking device was to Arnold Schwarzenegger:

The Shadow Shield is a brilliantly simple idea: It's just a reflective folding wall, with a small slit to place a gun through. You can't see your own reflection while looking at it, because it's angled slightly forward. If you were to get close enough, you would see that it's just a mirror, and then you'd see a gun barrel pointing at your head, and then you'd probably see whatever God deer are worshiping these days. Odin, maybe?

So hurry on out and buy yourself a Shadow Shield! Look, you saw for yourself: No downside! Even if you move, all the animals will see is a slightly rustling bush. And that's all your hunter friends will see, too. Just a tantalizing, rustling bush ...

5 The Net Gun

We'll let the website text introduce you to the Super Talon Net Gun: "Need an alternative to darts? Get a net gun. Need to rescue a bird that got entangled? Grab a net gun. Have a pet that always thinks you're trying to play tag with it and darts every time you get close? Grab a net gun."

That's right: From hunting to humanitarian missions to just getting your dog to hate you, nothing does it better than a cartoonish net-firing hand-cannon. Don't worry -- it doesn't require any special licenses or permits to operate, because it's technically classified as a "tool" instead of a "firearm" -- and you will be too, once you deploy something out of a Batman villain's arsenal just to bag a squirrel. It comes with a hefty $900 price tag, but for the arch nemesis on a budget, you can always just build one yourself.

Look, you're a hunter -- we all know that the logical evolution of this little hobby is going to terminate with you hunting the ultimate game: man. And Super Talon has got your back on that: The net gun's also meant for people! Law enforcement agencies purportedly use it "for riot control" so the subjects "are detained but not harmed," although safe money says it's really "for shits and giggles" because the subjects "are too drunk to remember you fired a net at the bar."

4 Barnes Varmint Grenade

The Barnes Varmint Grenade isn't actually a grenade, just a precisely engineered hollow-point bullet. It comes in two sizes: Regular ...

And Insecure:

You've probably at least heard of hollow-points before, so you know they're somehow more deadly than regular bullets. But those of you who aren't "gun people" need to see it in action to appreciate just how ridiculously overpowered it is:

Yes, those were prairie dogs, and yes, they were exploding into vapor.

The Varmint Grenade was designed by Barnes using "military-grade technology" to ensure that larger animals can be killed without damaging their valuable pelts, because the bullets expand so rapidly on impact that they don't actually punch through the other side of a larger animal. Small entrance hole on one side, nonexistent exit hole on the other side, bag of nice soft fur filled with animal soup inside. We should mention at this point that hollow-point bullets were actually banned for use in war by the Hague Convention, which predated the Geneva Conventions, because of their "inhumanity" ... so it's a good thing you're not usin' 'em on humanity, ain't it?! Yee-haw! Let's commitin' war-crimes agin' opossums!

3 The Gobbler Guillotine Wild Turkey Broadhead

We don't mean to come off as anti-hunting here. Our food has to come from somewhere; we know that. And if you approach it with the right attitude, hunting is certainly more respectable than buying your meat at the store. It's just that so much of this advanced hunting gear isn't "treating the exchange of life with humane reverence" as much as it is "dramatically over-murdering furry things because they frown when I talk about doing it to people." But now, finally, there's a product that bridges the two worlds of humane hunting and rampant sociopathy! The Gobbler Guillotine is exactly what the name suggests: a specially designed arrowhead, engineered to instantly behead turkeys.

Essentially, it's an arrowhead with four branching blades, forming a whirling dervish of death that, once fired, comically pops off the turkey's head. Then rednecks high-five about it in their tiny homoerotic man-shelters.

But no matter what the horrible attitudes of those hunters imply, it really is a humane method: Instant decapitation is much faster and more painless than any gun-shot ... if you're an expert archer. And with your laser-sighted compound bow, camouflaged blind and night-vision goggles, you'd fucking well better be.

2 The Internet

There's only one thing wrong with hunting: the outdoors. The killing's great, the free meat is great, the sense of undeserved confidence that comes with wielding a gun is fucking fantastic -- but all that fresh air and nature is a load of crap, isn't it? Well, don't worry. Just like every other terrible, morally bankrupt and probably illegal desire you have, the /internet has got your back on this one:

That thing is pretty much exactly what it looks like: A jury-rigged remote controlled gun platform hooked up to the Internet. This particular example had only three shotguns, but there were other platforms found in the area with upwards of six shotguns. You know, just in case you want to give that beaver the full "revolutionary firing squad" experience. Forty states have outright banned Internet hunting, but that doesn't stop people like Jay Williams, who created the above rig. He claims he set them up as hog control, but unless they're the hogs from Animal Farm, nobody's buying it.

1 The Punt Gun

Are you ready? Are your sweaty fingers poised above the keyboard, your keen -- albeit somewhat myopic and beady -- eyes ready to spot the pixels? Here we go:

Nope, that's real, and it's not a mock-up or a model. Those are called punt guns, and they range from 6 1/2 up to roughly 10 feet in length. They're basically just giant shotguns that fire a pound of shot with every trigger pull. Here's a video of one in action, as narrated by Tony the Tiger:

Two things just happened in that video: One, somebody got a great sound clip for his animated 80s mascot snuff film, and two, that fucking gun just destroyed 50 targets and the entire table they were mounted on. So what was it used for, repelling bear armies? Assassinating continents? Mugging the moon?

Nope: duck hunting.

Well, duck genocide, to be accurate: It's said that skilled punt gunners could kill more than 50 birds with one shot. Sadly, the practice was outlawed in 1860. That's right -- the Death Star of the hunting world was invented all the way back in the 19th century. They're too big to hold, unless you're a skinny androgynous Japanese RPG character, so they had to be mounted on little boats called "punts" -- hence the name. Here's a video of what punt gun hunting looked like:

If you told somebody you were "going duck hunting" back in the early 1800s, you would follow that statement by strolling out to the dock, lying down on a scale replica of a battleship and waging naval warfare on flocks of unsuspecting waterfowl. Think that's an unfair analogy? Consider this: For greater efficiency, hunters would often work in fleets of 10 punts or more.

Fleets. Fleets.

Fleets of these:

To get these:

Shit, we take it all back. We've been mocking the Shadow Shields and the explosive rounds as ridiculous, overpowered contrivances of the modern age; turns out that if anything, we've been toning the massacre way, way down over time.

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