Street Sweeping With the Armsel Striker

Every gun writer keeps a mental list of firearms they'd shoot exactly once and never need to shoot again, mostly out of morbid curiosity rather than any real desire to own one. One such gun I recently crossed off my bucket list is the   Armsel Striker, which has sat near the top of mine for years. So when a friend showed up with another friend to a recent range day with an actual Street Sweeper, I dropped what I was doing and immediately sauntered on over to take a look. This is one of a small handful of guns most shooters recognize only from movies, video games, or federal court filings, but one that few people get to shoot. So while my time with the gun was short, I felt like it was an experience worth writing up, even though this is less a full review than a field report on whether the legend I built up in my head about the Street Sweeper matched reality.

Street Sweeping With the Armsel Striker

The “Street Sweeper,” or more correctly the Striker, traces back to Hilton R. Walker, a Rhodesian who began developing the design in the early 1980s before emigrating to South Africa with the concept in his pocket. Production was financed by a company called Armsel and built by a separate local manufacturer, Aserma Manufacturing. Aserma Manufacturing is still technically in operation today, but only as the Applied Electronics wing of Reunert Limited. Reunert is still in the arms business, but has also expanded into mining and communications technology.

The idea for the Striker was straightforward and somewhat expected of a firearm of the 80s. The Striker was a bulky 12-gauge shotgun with a fixed 12-round revolving drum, which was an enormous capacity jump over the tube-fed pumps and semi-autos most agencies worldwide carried in patrol cars at the time. While it did operate similarly to one, the Striker’s mechanism is more alien compared to a standard revolver. Rather than rotating the drum on the trigger pull, the Striker's cylinder rotates when the trigger resets, driven by a coil spring inside the drum housing that has to be manually wound with a key on the front of the cylinder before you start shooting. ATF paperwork on later examples lists the action as semi-automatic, but functionally, it is a double action only that both releases the pre-tensioned drum in the first stage and then releases the hammer in the second stage. Interestingly enough, Wikipedia lists its action as “ Rotating Cylinder.”

Walker would both do an incremental update (our example today) and then later revisit the design in 1989 and release the Protecta, which dropped the winding requirement and added automatic ejection, fixing most of the original's reliability and battery of arms complaints. Around the same time, an American company that most of you might know called Cobray, operating under the SWD banner out of Atlanta, Georgia, began building its own version of the earlier pre-Protecta design and selling it as the Street Sweeper, which is where most of us get the name from Stateside. Cobray released the shotgun with ad copy claiming it could empty its full 12-round drum in under three seconds. Regardless of manufacturer, both share a reputation for a rather crude construction with aluminum cylinders and stamped steel parts.

The manual of arms is also what got the gun into federal trouble and bumped it from a Title I gun to a Destructive Device. The ATF had already denied import applications for the Striker-12 in 1984 and again in 1986, both times saying the gun was designed for military and law enforcement use rather than sporting purposes. In 1994, the agency made it official with   ATF Ruling 94-2, which was paired with a companion ruling on the USAS-12, which simultaneously reclassified the Striker-12 and Street Sweeper as destructive devices under the National Firearms Act. That alone is what makes these such rare finds these days and next to unobtanium.

It's worth noting today that the example from my photos at the range seems to be a late-production Sentinel Arms Striker-12 rather than a Cobray-pattern gun. The difference is that the true Armsel Striker and the Cobray Street Sweeper both require every case to be punched out by hand with the ejector rod, chamber by chamber. The Protecta went the opposite direction, dropping the wind-up spring entirely in favor of manually indexing the cylinder by pivoting the front grip and barrel shroud, while gaining gas-operated auto-ejection. Sentinel Arms' later Striker-12 kept the original wind-up spring and winding key, but borrowed the Protecta's auto-ejection, which vents a bit of the gas from each shot to kick out the previously fired case (this is hilariously unreliable sometimes). That auto-eject only happens as a byproduct of firing the next round, though, so it does nothing for any chambers you never fired and for the last fired case, which is why unloading one still ends with finishing the job by hand with the ejector rod.

“Never meet your heroes” comes to mind here. Actually shooting the thing is where the legendary shine of the Striker shotguns starts to wear off. Loading is a single-action revolver-style process through a gate on the back side of the drum, wound by a tension spring with a front key. The sequence is mostly smooth once you’ve done it a couple of times. You wind first, load each chamber through the gate, press the little button on the back of the receiver to advance the cylinder, top her up, flip off the cross-bolt safety, and then start ripping on the trigger. Compared to even a traditionally loaded shotgun, it’s not a fast system by any modern measure, and you’d be hard-pressed to run this thing “fast” outside of the 12 rounds you have to power through.

Equally as primitive, the sights are fixed through-and-blade irons, and calling them combat sights would be generous. They exist mostly to point the barrel in the right general direction, which is honestly appropriate for what this gun was built to do. Nobody buying a riot shotgun with a 12-round drum in the 1980s was shopping for precision, and running buckshot through it doesn't change that math. The shotgun has a surprising amount of heft for how little material there is present on most of the gun. A majority of that weight seems to be taken up by the barrel and its massive standoff device.

Buckshot was the only load we had on hand at the range that day, and the recoil impulse was genuinely unpleasant. Between the weight distribution, the minimal recoil management in the stock, and the load we used, the recoil and the concussion from the standoff device/muzzle brake felt like a flashbang going off nearby - not exactly debilitating, but it’ll jolt you around real good. It’s also worth noting that since this is technically a revolver, that also means there is indeed a cylinder gap, and that excess gas will painfully blast your forearm, even through long sleeves. There is really no good way to avoid this besides shooting the gun from the hip, marching fire style.

Unloading was the more interesting problem. Because our example didn’t reliably eject spent hulls on its own, every other case had to be punched out individually with a rod, which is the same basic process as clearing a Colt Peacemaker one chamber at a time. Slow rather than difficult, and it gave me a close look at every spent hull as it came out, which is when we noticed several primers had backed out, or blown fully out the rear of the cases. We actually managed to capture this happening on film.

I couldn't find anything online or in forums documenting blown primers as a known trait of this platform, and one range session isn't enough data to call it a pattern. Blown primers generally point to excess pressure, excessive headspace, or a poorly seated primer pocket, or a soft primer cup, and any of those is plausible given the gun's age and the fact that we were loading the gun with whatever mystery meat buckshot we had on hand. Also add to that the drum's individual chamber tolerances, and the fact that we can't speak to the quality of the buckshot we ran that day. Either way, despite the rather crude design, the Striker-12 is built like an absolute tank, and it feels like you’re firing one too. It’s definitely got a cool factor to it.

Final Thoughts

Getting to shoot an Armsel Striker was a great opportunity to cross something off my gun bucket list, and I'm glad I did it. It also confirmed something I keep relearning every time I get my hands on one of these rare or hard-to-find guns: the coolest firearms on paper aren't always the ones you actually want to own. For the Striker, I’d look at it more like a curiosity rather than something practical. The fact that the ATF has a “no-no” stamp attached to it, I think, is where it gets most of its appeal, as the reality of shooting it pales in comparison to the legend it has created for itself.

Personally, I think the battery of arms is clunky, the recoil impulse is rough even with relatively light buckshot loads, enough that I wouldn't want to run a full case of buckshot through one in a single sitting, and the construction reflects the budget end of 1980s manufacturing rather than anything built to last generations with all of our fancy inertia and gas-operated semi-autos. It gives me real Saturday night special vibes - the type that I’d normally get from something like a Jennings J-22. As a piece of firearms history, or to have as an NFA trophy, the Street Sweeper earns its reputation. As something I'd spend the money and paperwork to actually register and own, I'll pass, unless my supervillain lair budget finally comes through; these would make sweet henchmen guns.