Bonnie and Clyde’s Guns: The BAR, the $1 Million Shotgun and the Posse

Clyde Barrow’s favorite gun was the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle, a .30-06 military rifle he stole from National Guard armories because it could shoot straight through a police car. His everyday gun was a sawed-off 16-gauge Browning Auto-5 shotgun, the “whippet” he kept in his lap, and in August 2026 that exact shotgun sold for $1 million. Bonnie Parker died with a .38 Colt Detective Special taped to her thigh. The posse that killed them in 1934 answered with BARs of their own and Remington Model 8 rifles.

Here are all of the Bonnie and Clyde guns on the record, from the rifles and shotguns found in their car to the ones the posse used, the one that set a world record, and what the modern versions cost today.

Table of Contents

Bonnie and Clyde’s Guns at a Glance

Gun	Who	Caliber	What happened to it
M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR)	Clyde, Bonnie, the gang	.30-06	Three found in the death car; Frank Hamer kept the arsenal
Sawed-off Browning Auto-5 “whippet”	Clyde	16 gauge	Found in his lap; sold for $1 million in August 2026
Sawed-off Remington Model 11	Bonnie	20 gauge	Found in the death car, along with a sawed-off 10-gauge Winchester 1901
Colt Government Model 1911	Clyde	.45 ACP	Taken from his waistband; sold for $240,000 in 2012
Colt Detective Special	Bonnie	.38 Special	Taped to her thigh; sold for $264,000 in 2012
Remington Model 8	Frank Hamer, Prentiss Oakley (posse)	.35 Remington	Fired the first shots of the ambush

Clyde Barrow’s Favorite Gun: the Browning Automatic Rifle

The BAR was a World War I infantry weapon: a select-fire rifle weighing about 16 pounds that fed .30-06 Springfield cartridges from a 20-round box magazine. Clyde did not buy them. He broke into National Guard armories and took them, including one from the armory at Enid, Oklahoma, on July 7, 1933, and three more, plus handguns and a large amount of ammunition, from an armory at Plattville, Illinois, on August 20, 1933.

He wanted the BAR for one reason: penetration. Most lawmen of the early 1930s carried revolvers and, if they were lucky, a Thompson submachine gun firing .45 ACP pistol rounds. A .30-06 rifle bullet goes through a car door and out the other side. At Platte City, Missouri, in July 1933, officers armed with Thompsons ran into the gang’s BAR and lost the fight. The account of that shootout puts it bluntly: the officers’ .45 Thompsons “proved no match” for Barrow’s .30-caliber BAR.

Bonnie used it too. When Joplin police raided the gang’s apartment on April 13, 1933, she covered the escape with a BAR, and the rounds drove a Missouri Highway Patrol sergeant behind an oak tree while splinters flew into his face. The same raid gave the world its first look at the pair. They fled so fast they left a camera behind, and the undeveloped film became the most famous outlaw photos in American history.

Clyde’s Sawed-Off “Scattergun”

A factory BAR is about four feet long and weighs around 16 pounds, which is a lot of gun to swing around inside a Ford. So Clyde took a hacksaw to his. He had the barrel and gas tube shortened, and he had magazines made by welding two 20-round BAR magazines together, for 40 rounds between reloads. He called the result his “scattergun.” It wasn’t a shotgun at all. The name came from what happened when he opened up with it: everyone scattered. The finished gun was close to the Colt Monitor, a shortened BAR that Colt built in small numbers in the early 1930s, almost all for law enforcement. Baby Face Nelson may have carried a real one to his last gunfight, though some accounts give him a .351 Winchester instead. Clyde’s cut-down BARs are why the lawmen chasing him kept finding themselves outgunned by a man in a stolen car.

The cartridge that made the BAR so effective is still one of America’s great hunting rounds. Our .30-06 buyer’s guide explains why it has lasted more than a century, and our best .30-06 rifles list covers the bolt-actions most people buy it in today.

Can You Buy a BAR Today?

Not the one Clyde stole. A real M1918 is a machine gun, and only pre-1986 registered examples can change hands, at collector prices. The legal way in is Ohio Ordnance Works’ HCAR, a modernized semi-automatic rifle built on the BAR design:

Don’t confuse it with the Browning BAR hunting rifle sold today. Same letters, different gun: the modern Browning BAR is a gas-operated semi-auto deer rifle with no military lineage at all. We cover it in our Browning BAR Mk4 review.

The $1 Million Shotgun: Clyde’s Browning Auto-5 “Whippet”

The most famous Bonnie and Clyde shotgun is a sawed-off 16-gauge Browning Auto-5, and in August 2026 it became the most expensive shotgun ever sold at auction. According to Rock Island Auction Company, it’s the gun in the photo of Bonnie playfully aiming a short shotgun at Clyde. It’s a 16-gauge Browning Auto-5 with the barrel and stock cut down into what the gang called a “whippet.” Clyde carried it everywhere. When the posse’s shooting stopped on May 23, 1934, Sheriff Henderson Jordan found it “in the lap of Clyde Barrow,” with his right hand “curled around the shortened stock.”

Rock Island Auction Company sold it at its August 2026 Premier Auction in Bedford, Texas, for $1 million. That set a world record for a shotgun at auction, beating Billy the Kid’s double-barrel 10-gauge, which sold for $978,312 in 2021. According to the auction house, a bullet mark on the left side of the gun matches photos taken right after the ambush, and ATF documents state that “significant provenance has been established” that it is the gun recovered at the scene.

The Auto-5 was John Browning’s design and the first successful semi-automatic shotgun. FN in Belgium built it for most of the 20th century, and Remington made a licensed near-copy, the Model 11, from 1905 to 1947. The gang used both, sawing off Model 11s the same way. A semi-auto with four shells in the tube and one in the chamber, cut short enough to hide under a coat, was about as much firepower as a man could carry in 1933. For the modern, legal way to get a short, handy shotgun, see our best short-barrel shotguns guide. Sawing a barrel under 18 inches, the way Clyde did, now makes it a federally regulated short-barreled shotgun.

Browning still sells an A5, and the 16-gauge “Sweet Sixteen” is back in the lineup. It keeps the famous square-backed receiver, but inside it’s a different, inertia-driven action introduced in 2012. Our Browning A5 review covers how it shoots, and the best 16-gauge shotguns list shows where it ranks:

Clyde’s Pistol: the Colt 1911

Like most gunmen of the era, Clyde carried the Colt Government Model 1911 in .45 ACP, another John Browning design. The one found in his waistband after the ambush sold for $240,000 in 2012 at RR Auction in New Hampshire, the same sale as Bonnie’s revolver.

Colt still makes the Series 70 Government, and it’s the closest thing on the market to the gun Clyde carried. Our Colt 1911 Government review goes through it in detail. If a real Colt is too rich, the best 1911s under $1,000 and cheap 1911s under $500 lists cover the alternatives.

Bonnie Parker’s Gun: the .38 Taped to Her Thigh

The cigar photo made Bonnie the “cigar-smoking gun moll” in newspapers across the country, and it followed her for the rest of her short life. Ted Hinton, one of the posse, later claimed the cigar had been retouched by darkroom staff at the Joplin Globe. Either way, the revolver in her hand was real.

Bonnie Parker’s gun was a Colt Detective Special in .38 Special, a six-shot snub-nose Colt introduced in 1927 for plainclothes police, and she died with it taped to her thigh. It sold for $264,000 at the same 2012 auction, the highest bid of the sale. She also had her own shotgun, a Remington Model 11 in 20 gauge cut down to just ahead of the magazine tube, and it was in the car with her when she was killed.

A small .38 revolver is still one of the most popular carry guns in America, and Colt’s modern Cobra is the Detective Special’s closest living relative: six shots of .38 Special in a 2-inch-barreled frame. Our best snub-nose revolvers and best .38 Special revolvers lists compare it with the Smith & Wesson and Ruger options, and our best concealed carry handguns guide shows how revolvers stack up against modern pistols.

The Guns That Stopped Them: the Posse’s Arsenal

Bonnie and Clyde were killed by a six-man posse armed with BARs, Remington Model 8 rifles, shotguns and pistols. Retired Texas Ranger Frank Hamer was hired after Clyde’s January 1934 Eastham prison breakout and spent 102 days tracking the pair, and he learned from the lawmen who had failed before him. After a botched ambush at Sowers, Texas, in November 1933, deputies examined Clyde’s abandoned Ford and found that bullets from Ted Hinton’s Thompson hadn’t gone through the body. So this time Hinton asked for a Browning Automatic Rifle, and he got a Colt Monitor, the short police BAR, on loan from the Texas National Guard. The posse would meet Clyde with his own favorite gun.

Hamer’s own rifle was a customized Remington Model 8 in .35 Remington, serial number 10045. He ordered it from Pet McKay’s Sporting Goods in Austin, Texas, and had it modified to take a “police only” 20-round magazine. Deputy Prentiss Oakley also carried a Model 8, and all six men agreed that his was the first shot fired, the one that hit Clyde in the head.

The Model 8 was also a John Browning design. So Browning designed Clyde’s rifle, Clyde’s shotgun and Clyde’s pistol, and he designed the rifle that killed him too. For more on the man, see our profile of John Moses Browning.

About 130 Rounds in Seconds

The trap was set through a gang member. Henry Methvin, one of the men Clyde broke out of Eastham, had become separated from the gang, and Clyde had named Methvin’s parents’ place in Bienville Parish as a meeting point. The posse persuaded the Methvins to help, and on the morning of the ambush Ivy Methvin’s truck was parked on the shoulder of Louisiana Highway 154 as the lure. In exchange, Henry Methvin was spared.

At about 9:15 a.m. on May 23, 1934, on a rural road between Gibsland and Sailes in Bienville Parish, Louisiana, Clyde slowed his Ford V8 beside a parked truck. The six lawmen opened fire from the bushes. One of them later described the order of fire: “Each of us six officers had a shotgun and an automatic rifle and pistols. We opened fire with the automatic rifles. They were emptied before the car got even with us. Then we used shotguns.” Then they emptied their pistols at the car as it rolled into a ditch.

The posse fired about 130 rounds, with some accounts putting it closer to 150. Film shot by a deputy afterward showed 112 bullet holes in the car. The coroner counted 17 entrance wounds on Clyde and 26 on Bonnie. The Ford itself survived and is on display at the Primm Valley Resort in Primm, Nevada.

What Was in the Death Car?

The Bonnie and Clyde death car held a rolling armory. MeatEater’s inventory lists three BARs in .30-06, a sawed-off 20-gauge Remington Model 11, a sawed-off 10-gauge Winchester Model 1901 lever-action shotgun, seven Colt 1911 .45s, a .45 Colt M1909 revolver, a .32 Colt M1903 pistol, a .25 Colt pistol and a .38 Detective Special, plus 100 loaded 20-round BAR magazines and about 3,000 rounds of other ammunition. The police also found 15 sets of license plates from different states. The reward money mostly never came, so each lawman ended up with $200.23. Instead they were allowed to keep what they found, and Hamer took most of the guns. That’s where the provenance of today’s million-dollar pieces starts. Clyde’s mother later wrote to Hamer asking for the guns back. There’s no record that he answered.

Did Bonnie and Clyde Use a Tommy Gun?

Not as their gun of choice, whatever the movies show. The Thompson was the gangster gun of Chicago, but Clyde thought the BAR was better, and he had a point: the Thompsons in this story mostly belonged to the police, and they kept losing. Dallas Sheriff Smoot Schmid’s Thompson jammed on the first round at Sowers. Five months after the Gibsland ambush, federal agents and local police killed Pretty Boy Floyd in an Ohio cornfield. The full Thompson story, and the rest of the era’s weapons, are in our guide to Prohibition gangster guns. If you want one of your own, the semi-auto Thompson is still made, and our guide to buying a Tommy gun explains the legal options:

Where Are Bonnie and Clyde’s Guns Now?

• Clyde’s 16-gauge Auto-5 whippet: sold for $1 million at Rock Island Auction Company, August 2026.
• Clyde’s Colt 1911 .45: sold for $240,000 at RR Auction, 2012.
• Bonnie’s Colt Detective Special .38: sold for $264,000 at the same 2012 sale, to the same private buyer.
• The rest of the death-car arsenal: kept by Frank Hamer and the posse, with pieces surfacing at auction ever since.
• The car: on display at the Primm Valley Resort in Nevada.

For more guns that crossed the million-dollar line, see our list of the most expensive guns ever sold. Their story also runs through our roundup of the most famous gunfights in history.

You won’t find a Bonnie and Clyde gun for less than six figures, but vintage Auto-5s, Model 11s and old Colts turn up on the used gun market all the time. For new guns, our shotgun deals and handgun deals pages track the best current prices across more than 200 retailers.

Frequently Asked Questions

Featured image: Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, 1933, public domain, with added text.