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So former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has been assassinated, shot at 9ft with a home made gun.
Rather than the politics or motives, I'll just look at the gun itself, it was interesting to see the first images on social media and trying to make out what it actually was. The first footage was low resolution and fuzzy, and it was difficult to make out, but it looked like a very bulky gun, initially I think maybe a chunky 3D printed affair with embedded steel pipes, but with better photos it comes out as something far more crude.
The barrels are a pair of steel plumbing pipes, or similar, attached to a base with a grip all made from a plank of wood, using zip-ties and black electrical tape. The barrels seem to have solid rears, and like it would be loaded from the muzzle, and there also appears to be some sort of battery pack attached to the underside, with wires going into the chambers. Seemingly the ignition is electric, possibly made from something such as an electric BBQ lighter, or just about anything else which can make a simple arc.
The propellant could be a wide number of things, match heads (solid or ground up), ground up fireworks, potassium chlorate and sugar, even true and traditional blackpowder (in which case you could skip something like a primary load and just use electricity for touching it off, like here). The large volume of white smoke with each shot suggests a propellant such as blackpowder. Projectiles could be anything, lead fishing weights, lead airgun pellets, steel ball bearings, someone even suggested Pachinko Balls.
Weapons of similar construction were recovered from the assassin's home, with two larger ones bearing five and nine barrels. All in all, these guns and their ammunition are made from common hardware store materials and other innocuous off the shelf items, stuff you can find all around the world and which only takes someone modestly technically minded to put together.