Credit Card Sized Shotgun

From the "Why Don't They Just Throw A Rock?" department, comes the silliest defense weapon since the belt-buckle revolver. Introduced by a small company near Minneapolis, it is a two-shot, electrically fired, muzzle loading shotgun in a block of metal the size of a credit card.

How many ways can this screw up? Let's see: The batteries could die. The powder could be damp. The powder could be loose. You could load too much (or too little) powder. You could be more than two feet from the target. The thing could just jump out of your hand when fired (no handle). The firing button could get pressed in your pocket. And so on.

The effectiveness of the weapon is also questionable. Judging from the photo, the barrels look to be around .25 caliber. For reference, a 12 gauge shotgun is .73 caliber. This gun fires seven .17 caliber pellets in a load. The conventional 12 gauge 00 buckshot (referred to as double-ought) shell contains nine or more .33 caliber pellets. It would probably be more effective to throw the gun at an assailant than to fire it.