A little while back, photos of a camera gun made the rounds on all the cool blogs, and people everywhere thought they were new and exciting. How easily we forget… Camera guns — analog cameras and film cameras mounted to gun barrels or provided with pistol grips — were more common in the 60s and 70s than we might think today.

I watched an episode of Columbo last night, entitled “The Greenhouse Jungle”, released 10/15/72 (almost 37 years ago) and in it, Columbo’s assistant pulled out a camera gun that looked even better than the stuff making the rounds these days.

As he explained in the episode, the device was a “camera-mounted starlight scope”, used “quite a bit at Berkeley for night work”.

Since I can find no modern camera guns, I’m tempted to call them a lost art, perhaps yet another victim of a PC society where everyone’s afraid of everything.

I think the inspiration for camera guns came from the portable video cameras equipped with a pistol grip, sold around the same time period. They looked like this.

These last two images came from a site called Atomic Rocket, where they have a whole page dedicated to futuristic sidearms.