Often seen, but rarely in person, the Techno Arms MAG-7 was one of the firearms fixtures of my childhood, appearing in seemingly every compendium and encyclopedia of small arms I could get my hands on growing up. It’s an extremely strange gun, sort of a hybrid of a Remington 870, an Uzi, and the designer’s dubious sanity. It’s really thanks to it occupying a sort of aesthetic and conceptual “halfway point” between a shotgun and a submachine gun, I think, that has made it so popular in the tabletop gun books I kept on my shelves growing up.

Ian of Forgotten Weapons posted a video yesterday where he takes a rare look at an imported MAG-7, including a brief overview, field-strip, and shooting the weapon:

Production of the MAG-7 began in 1995, and according to that most trustworthy of sources, Wikipedia, Techno Arms Ltd. is still in business as of 2012 and making the MAG-7, although who they could possibly be selling them to is evades me.

With only five rounds, and such poor ergonomics, the MAG-7 was destined to be a curio. Even its hallmark trait – the short overall length – is not so impressive when you consider that a pistol-grip only Remington 870 with a 4 shot tube, +1 mag extension, and 14″ barrel is only about 26.5″ in overall length, compared to 21.6″ for the MAG-7, while bringing vastly superior ergonomics, weight (an 870 in such a configuration would be about 3 pounds lighter), and far better ammunition selection. Despite being in theory a hybrid between a submachine gun and a shotgun, the MAG-7 seems to be in execution just a pretty poor shotgun.