Category: All About Guns

Setting the Stage

Bonnie Elizabeth Parker’s was an undeniably hard life. Born in 1910 in Rowena, Texas, the second of three children, Bonnie seemed cursed with poor judgment. Her father was a bricklayer who died when she was 4. Her mom worked as a seamstress to keep her family from starving. Bonnie came of age living in her grandparents’ home in a place called Cement City in West Dallas.

At age 15, Bonnie married Roy Thornton. Roy was an old-school loser. He was in and out of prison for most of their brief time together, but they never actually divorced. Bonnie was still wearing Roy’s wedding ring when she died. Thornton was shot to death attempting to escape the Huntsville State Prison in 1937.

After her husband was incarcerated, Bonnie began working as a waitress in a Dallas diner. She was said to be cute and flirtatious. One of her regular customers was a local postal worker named Ted Hinton. Hinton was even rumored to have had a crush on the petite blonde at one time. In one of fate’s epic tragedies, Ted Hinton was part of the posse that ultimately killed Bonnie Parker and her sociopath boyfriend, Clyde Barrow.

Clyde Chestnut Barrow grew up poor on a scale unimaginable today. As a boy, Clyde’s family lived underneath the family wagon. It was a significant step up when his father could finally afford a tent. The fifth of seven kids born to an itinerant farmer and his wife, Clyde just seemed to come from the factory broken. He was arrested for the first time at age 17 for stealing a turkey. Bigger stuff followed.

Clyde Barrow was not a terribly imposing man, and he attracted unwanted attention in prison. After being repeatedly sexually assaulted, Barrow beat his tormentor to death with a lead pipe. This was Clyde’s first documented murder. A fellow inmate already serving life claimed responsibility so Barrow could still be eligible for release.

Clyde had little interest in hard labor in the prison fields, so he had another prisoner chop off two of his toes with an ax. His mother unexpectedly secured his release effective six days later. The subsequent limp followed him the rest of his days.

Clyde’s time in prison irrevocably changed him. Where other Depression-era gangsters typically robbed banks to increase their status and fortune, Clyde Barrow sought revenge on the Texas prison system. Clyde and his gang killed at least nine police officers and four innocent civilians along the way.

The Browning Auto-5 (top) can be seen as the forebear of the Remington Model 11 that came later.

The Guns

Bonnie and Clyde robbed 10 banks. However, their preferred targets were small rural stores and funeral homes. Where John Dillinger was partial to the Thompson submachine gun, Clyde Barrow opted for the penetration and overwhelming firepower of the Browning Automatic Rifle.

Clyde procured his BARs from National Guard armories. Back then, the National Guard stockpiled ammunition at these facilities as well. For a guy like Barrow, these armories were like department stores.

At 4’11” and 90 lbs., Bonnie Parker was an undeniably tiny lass. She lacked the substance to manage such artillery as Clyde’s heavy BARs. As a result, Barrow crafted a particular weapon just for her.

The Remington Model 11 autoloading shotgun was a license-produced copy of the Browning Auto-5. With a long recoil design, the barrel on the Model 11 could be pruned back without adversely affecting reliability. Clyde was known to use a 12-gauge version for his smash and grab robberies.

Bonnie had outfitted a pair of Clyde’s trousers with a tear-away pocket on the leg to accommodate the muzzle of this shortened scattergun. Clyde managed the grip through a hole in his jacket pocket. When it was time to get real, he threw back his coat and whipped the muzzle out before anyone could respond.

Bonnie’s customized Model 11 was a 20 gauge. Gangster enthusiasts called these stubby cut-down Model 11 shotguns “whippits.” She supposedly used her personalized scattergun for a most heinous crime.

The Killings

On April 1, 1934, two Texas Highway Patrol motorcycle officers happened upon a car stopped on the side of rural Route 114 near Grapevine, Texas. The cops had no reason to be suspicious. Without warning, a pair of outlaws suddenly opened fire.

Both men collapsed, severely injured. Legend has it a petite young lady subsequently exited the car with a sawed-off shotgun and executed them at contact range.

The Bonnie and Clyde mythos has been flavored through the decades into something romantic and adventurous. The reality, however, was the first couple of crime were actually just a pair of run-of-the-mill psychopaths.

Bonnie Parker apologists insist Clyde actually killed these two patrolmen. Bonnie had previously been badly burned on the leg in an auto accident and was still recovering. However, history has attributed these two merciless executions to the cute little blonde.

You don’t shotgun a pair of cops in America and get away with it. Legendary Texas Ranger Frank Hamer tracked the pair relentlessly before setting an ambush along with several other lawmen on a rural road in Bienville Parish in Louisiana some two months later.

After a storm of rifle, pistol and shotgun fire, Barrow was found to have suffered 17 gunshot wounds. Parker had 26. Tom Hinton, Bonnie’s former customer at the diner, wielded a Colt Monitor BAR and quite possibly killed her.

John Moses Browning was the most prolific gun designer in human history. He viewed the Auto-5 as his most inspired design. Photo: Public Domain

This vintage Remington Model 11 was badly freckled and reblued at some point. This made it cheap and ripe for customization.

Cutting the buttstock back took little talent. Just measure carefully to ensure you leave room for the recoil mechanism nestled inside.

Will used a table saw with a cutoff wheel to shorten the barrel and then fabricated a new front sight bead out of a machine screw. A plumber’s pipe cutter would also produce a nice clean square cut.

Source Material

You can dump a holy fortune on a proper gun collection these days. The era of cheap machine guns and serendipitous barn finds died with the advent of the internet.

The nickel-plated Colt .38 revolver taped to Bonnie’s thigh when she died sold for $99,000 at auction in 2014. However, I built a decent approximation of Bonnie Parker’s whippit for markedly less.

John Moses Browning originally conceived what would ultimately become the Remington Model 11 shotgun in 1898. His subsequent Browning Auto-5 was the world’s first successful autoloading shotgun. Of all his firearms designs, Browning was said to have been most taken with this one.

Browning first tried to sell the Auto-5 to Winchester. Winchester failed to meet Browning’s demands, so he took the design to Remington. The Remington CEO died of a heart attack mid-negotiation, so Browning offered his shotgun to Fabrique Nationale in Belgium.

Remington eventually purchased the rights to build the gun, marketing it from 1906 until 1947. The most significant difference between the Remington and FN versions was the lack of a manual magazine cutoff.

This revolutionary design incorporated a pair of recoil systems. The first managed the recoil of the gun proper and resided within the forearm. The second mechanism telescoped into the stock and returned the bolt into battery after the primary system had cycled the barrel. The mechanism of this second system governed how short the buttstock may be pruned.

There is an undeniable allure to collecting gangster guns like these.

Will is usually the first to admit it’s fun to dress up in a cheap pinstripe suit found at a consignment shop, grease his hair back and play around with a gangster gun on the range.

Whipping Up a Whippit

My gun was a badly pitted reblued beater I found on GunBroker for $230. This wrecked any collector’s value it might have had. I could therefore chop it up without guilt.

Using a cutoff wheel on my table saw, I cut the barrel down to 18″. The details of this process should be included in another article in this magazine. Keep the barrel longer than 18″ and the overall length more than 26, and the gun doesn’t require NFA registration.

I removed the stock and localized the back end of the recoil spring assembly before pruning the stock on the table saw.

I fabricated a new buttplate from workshop scraps, sanded everything to match and touched up the ugly bits with dark wood stain. The result is a decent rendition of Bonnie Parker’s whippit that cost me $230 and a little workshop time.

The love struck criminals met their gory end on a deserted road in Louisiana at the hands of determined lawmen.

Bonnie and Clyde were larger-than-life figures during the era of the motorized bandit. Their pilfered and customized weapons played an out sized role in their notoriety.

Denouement

When Frank Hamer and his men picked through the car after Bonnie and Clyde were killed, they found 100 loaded BAR magazines and another 3,000 rounds of assorted ammunition.

In addition to three BARs, Bonnie’s cut-down 20-gauge Model 11, and her .38 Colt Detective Special revolver, the couple was also packing a short-barreled Winchester Model 1901 lever-action 10 gauge, assorted civilian handguns and seven looted Government Colt M1911 pistols.

Bonnie Parker enjoyed photography as a hobby. Much of how the world perceived Bonnie and Clyde was formed from a series of pictures on an undeveloped roll of film discovered by law enforcement.

These pictures showed the playful criminals snuggling with each other and clowning around with their weapons. These widely distributed images created a mythos.

Bonnie smoked cigarettes, but not cigars. The persona of the cigar-chomping moll wielding a shotgun had no basis in reality, but it captivated the American public.

The combination of illicit sex during a somewhat puritanical period and the couple’s gory demise transformed Bonnie and Clyde into legends of the motorized bandit era. Building up a copy of Bonnie’s unique shotgun let me taste just a little bit of that dark magic myself.