Adler fired up shooters' imagination

The social media world was abuzz just two years ago over discovery of this new lever-action shotgun on the world’s market.

The shooters were excited about having access to something which pushed the legal boundaries after a decade of former PM John Howard’s gun austerity.

Queensland gun importer NIOA fired their imagination after their buyers first saw the Turkish-made weapon at a German gun show.

Many Australian shooters were still angry over being forced to hand over their five-shot gas operated automatic shotguns which were scrapped under the Howard buybacks in the late 1990s.

Lever-action firearms were allowed under the redrafted laws, the technology has been around as long as the Wild West, nothing to fear here.

NIOA, owned by Robert Nioa, the son-in-law of maverick Queensland MP Bob Katter, is Australia’s biggest importer of firearms and is based at Brisbane.

NIOA imported a pair of the seven-shot Adlers in 2015 for “testing” at its Brisbane facility and shot some in-house range video at the same time.

Under the camera’s gaze, the company ran hundreds of 12 gauge rounds through the shotgun to prove its reliability, and its rapidity.

With seven shells in the underneath tube, and one in the barrel, the eight shots could be dispatched in seconds, their experts showed.

It was that video, which NIOA hurriedly took down off its Facebook page a few weeks later, which went ballistic across social media sites frequented by legal shooters.

NIOA and its distributors quickly received 6600 orders for the firearm courtesy of that original video.

After I broke the story, senior police raised the alarm about the potential for the weapon finding its way into “wrong” hands.

Despite the firearm being legal, and later restricted to five-shots under the Abbott Government deal, it was the sheer popularity of the firearm, the number of them being shipped across from Turkey, which alarms officialdom.

People who already own them say they can be clunky, difficult to aim (and load) and slow to reload when empty but surprisingly light.

They are relatively cheap as firearms go, about $900 a pop.

They are popular among farmers and duck shooters.

There are all sorts of weird and wonderful weapons being imported into Australia.

Guns which look like crossbows, shotguns with three barrels.

The Adler is something which a marketing video proved just too successful at selling.