Spring Gun

A spring gun is a shotgun or similar firearm rigged with a tripwire or other triggering device so that it fires automatically when disturbed, with no one present to pull the trigger. Property owners in Britain and elsewhere used spring guns from at least the eighteenth century to protect graveyards from grave robbers and to guard houses, orchards, and game estates against trespassers, and British forces even set one in a Williamsburg, Virginia magazine in 1775. The 1825 English court case Bird v. Holbrook held that an owner could be liable for injuries a spring gun caused even to a trespasser, and spring guns and man-traps were outlawed in England in 1827, though spring guns kept appearing elsewhere afterward, including on the Cold War era inner German border and in isolated criminal cases in the United States into the twentieth century.