Armsel Striker

The Armsel Striker is a 12-gauge combat shotgun built around a 12-round revolving cylinder, designed for riot control and close combat. It was created in 1981 by Hilton R. Walker, a Zimbabwean citizen who subsequently emigrated to South Africa taking the design with him. The shotgun sold well and was exported widely despite significant drawbacks, and has been produced and copied under a range of names including the Sentinel Arms Striker-12, the Protecta, the Protecta Bulldog and the SWD Street Sweeper.

Because the cylinder is far too large to be indexed by the trigger pull as on a conventional revolver, the original Striker uses a clock spring that must be wound by hand before firing. Reloading is correspondingly slow: there is no automatic ejection, so spent shells must be pushed out one at a time with an ejector rod on the right side of the barrel, the cylinder loaded a shell at a time and advanced with a lever at the rear of the weapon, and the spring finally rewound. Barrel lengths of 7, 12 and 18 inches were offered, with a top-folding stock.

Walker redesigned the weapon in 1989 as the Protecta, removing the cylinder rotation spring altogether - the cylinder is instead advanced by rotating the barrel shroud and its attached foregrip, turning the shotgun from a semi-automatic into a manually operated one - and adding an auto-ejection system that vents gas from firing into the cylinder to eject the previous round. The ejector rod remains, since the last case must still be cleared by hand. The Protecta Bulldog is an extremely shortened stockless version for building entry and vehicle work. Licensed copies by Sentinel Arms combined the Striker's spring-driven semi-automatic action with the Protecta's auto-ejection, while the American Cobray/SWD Street Sweeper of 1989-1993 was a lower-end clone with limited parts commonality.

Following a 1993 proposal by the Brady Campaign, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen declared the Striker and Street Sweeper destructive devices under the National Firearms Act the following year, placing their transfer and ownership under ATF regulation. The shotgun has served with the South African National Defence Force, the Israel Police, the Sri Lankan Air Force, the People's Army of Vietnam and Chile's Lautaro Special Operations Brigade.