Vintage Arms Six12

Scalable, Six-shot Cylinder, Scattergun.

- Jason Davis

We all know that sound when a typical 12-gauge pump action shotgun takes a round from the magazine tube and shoves it into the chamber. For some folks it means freedom; for others it instills apprehension, which may not be a bad thing. That sound is completely absent with the new SIX12 Modular Shotgun. Loaded from a removable six-round cylinder, this new weapon system works off of a pull of the trigger, rather than the shooter cycling a typical fore-end back and forth. 

Caleb Crye and Gregg Thompson, joint owners of Crye Precision, recently formed Vantage Arms in Nashville, Tennessee, to bring this vision of a compact, rotary-magazine scattergun to market. The initial design and input came from years of collaboration with military, law-enforcement, and shooters throughout the world who felt a need for this modular-type weapon. 

What they ended up creating is highly compact system that’s able to be mounted to a rifle, or configured as a standalone full-length shotgun, a compact breaching gun, or even as a fully integrated suppressed weapon system. Once in front of the end-user, the shotgun can be used for anything from blowing open doors to hunting to home defense, though we’d guess the majority of sales will be to guys who need to get into a building quickly.

Getting into the core of the weapon and the design behind the SIX12, the designers wanted a gun that was compact, reliable, and modular. This led to the use a revolver action that allows the overall gun to be very short — there’s no bolt that has to travel rearward and take up space behind the round. And reliability is aided by the action being purely mechanical and not reliant on either a gas system or the user to shuck the fore-end.