Braxton Taylor
Money. Weapons. The power to make enemies disappear. Dictators seem to have it all. Some of them even take all three of those things wrapped up in one small but telling symbol of autocracy: the golden gun.
Yet, despite the appearance of power, a gun made of gold (or gold-plated) is never enough to save them from their comeuppance.
Political scientist Marcel Dirsus calls it “the Golden Gun Paradox:” the idea that a tyrant can have “all the trappings of power, even a gun made of gold,” but can never use that power to save themselves when the need arises. When the end comes for these guys, it usually comes from the barrel of a regular ol’ steel-made weapon.
Here are a few of those historical tyrants whose lives came to an abrupt end – and whose golden guns couldn’t save them.
Adolf Hitler’s 50th Birthday Walther PP
When Germany’s Fuhrer turned 50 years old in 1939, he was presented with a gift from German firearms manufacturer Carl Walther: an engraved gold Walther PP. The PP (or Polizeipistole) was one of the world’s first successful double-action, semi-automatic pistols. Walther began mass production of the weapon in 1929, but Hitler adopted it for use by Nazi Wehrmacht officers, especially those in the Luftwaffe.
Walther’s .32-caliber, specially embellished PP featured floral engravings and the dictator’s initials adorned upon its ivory pistol grips. In a Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945, Hitler’s valet Heinz Linge entered the room where the dictator shot himself in the temple. On the floor in front of his body were two guns; one was a Walther PP, but not the Fuhrer’s golden one. It was supposedly found by American GIs in Hitler’s Munich apartment that same year.
Muammar Gaddafi’s Browning Hi-Power and Beretta 93-R
Gold would be too soft a metal to make a Browning M1911, so the golden one found on Libya’s dictator Muammar Gaddafi would have had to be gold-plated. It was purportedly a gift to the now-deposed Col. Gaddafi from one of his sons on the 32nd anniversary of his rise to power in 1969. It features engraved Arabic script near the trigger, ornate gold embossing, a profile of the dictator on one side of the handle, and the Seal of Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya on the other.
Gaddafi was fleeing the decisive 2011 Battle of Sirte, in which he personally led his outnumbered loyalist forces against Libyan rebels. Wounded in the loss of the city, Gaddafi surrendered to the rebels after his bodyguards gave up. He was subsequently tortured and killed. One rebel soldier, Mohammed Elbibi, was famously photographed with the weapon.
The Hi-Power wasn’t the only golden gun in Gaddafi’s arsenal. The Beretta Museum in Gardone Val Trompia, Italy, is full of wondrous firearms, and there is no shortage of gold or gold-plated guns. Among them is a fully-automatic golden Beretta 93R Raffica, made especially for Gaddafi. It also came equipped with a full stock made of gold. It also had the colonel’s name written in its Italian form, engraved along the slide of the weapon.
“It was a different political situation,” the curator of the museum told The Firearm Blog’s James Reeves in 2022. The time period of that “political situation” is unclear from the video.
Manuel Noriega’s Antique Flintlock Rifles
If there was a single despot the term “tinpot dictator” was created for, Manuel Noriega was probably the one. The former Panamanian ruler would do almost anything for money, which included funneling arms from both the United States and Cuba to civil wars in Latin America. He allowed Panamanian ports to be used for drug running, and the country was also the home of Cold War spy operations from both East and West. Meanwhile, Noriega was providing intelligence on all of it to whoever would pay him.
With all that in mind, it’s not surprising that he didn’t last very long. His fraught hold on power lasted a scant six years, and his government fell to a U.S. invasion in less than 24 hours. Noriega’s seized weapons were taken back to Letterkenny Army depot in Pennsylvania. The haul included flintlock rifles with gold etchings and inlays. More than 51,000 items were in the dictator’s personal collection – and no one knows what happened to it.
Saddam Hussein’s AK-47
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and his sons weren’t the only ones to have golden Kalashnikov rifles, but they might be the only ones to hand out so many of them (he gave two to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, for example). One of Hussein’s gold-plated, short-barreled Iraqi-built AKs was captured on its way through Heathrow Airport in London in 2003 and is now on display in England’s Royal Armouries Museums.
Saddam and sons actually gave away a lot of different weapons, both to influence outsiders and to show appreciation. The Iraqi despot gave the Bulgaria National Academy of the Ministry of the Interior a gold-plated Sterling submachine gun as a thank you for training Iraqi officers and U.S. troops found a gold-plated MP5 in one of Saddam’s palaces. The weapon he actually had on him when he was captured in Tikrit in 2003 was a regular ol’ 9mm Glock 18C. That weapon was presented to President George W. Bush.
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