Winchester Model 12 Riot Gun

About the Winchester Model 12 Riot Gun

The Winchester Model 12 Riot Gun is the short-barreled police and guard variant of the Model 12 pump-action shotgun, a hammerless smoothbore 12-gauge designed by Thomas Crossley Johnson. Introduced in 1918, it pairs the standard Model 12 takedown receiver with a plain 20-inch cylinder-bore barrel, but unlike the military trench gun it carries no perforated heat shield and no bayonet adapter. Marketed to police departments, sheriffs, express messengers and railroad guards, the riot gun holds up to six 2.75-inch shells in its tubular magazine and, thanks to the absence of a trigger disconnector, can be slam-fired by holding the trigger down while cycling the action, making it a formidable close-range weapon.

The plain-barreled riot gun was the everyday police and prison-guard companion to the more famous trench gun, riding in patrol cars, railway express cars and bank guard racks throughout the 20th century.

Winchester Model 12 Riot Gun specifications

The riot gun differs from the Model 12 trench gun only in lacking the heat shield and bayonet lug; both used the same 20-inch cylinder-bore barrel. After the 1934 Federal Migratory Bird Act, civilian and law-enforcement guns typically shipped with a removable wooden magazine plug limiting capacity to two shells. Riot guns saw service alongside trench guns from World War I through Vietnam.