January 4, 2004, Updated September 19, 2012

“I believe that the Corner Shot weapon system can be extremely beneficial in the global war on terror,” – Corner Shot co-founder Amos Golan.A tense SWAT team, masked and clad in body-armor cautiously sidles up to a decrepit urban warehouse in the dead of night, as terrorists holed-up inside guard hostages. But until the assault team knows exactly where the gunmen are hiding the captives, they can’t risk casualties or drawing return fire.

However military and anti-terror assault teams can now observe and engage a target from behind a corner, staying safely out of the line of fire. Equipped with the ‘Corner Shot’ small-arms weapons system developed in Israel, the team’s point man deftly snaps the business end of a pistol mounted on the end of his rifle to a near 60-degree angle, gingerly nosing it up over a windowsill to get a view of the darkened room.

Quickly scanning the room’s interior with a high-resolution night-vision camera mounted on the barrel, he sights a gunman in the viewfinder’s crosshairs, and paints him with an infrared laser spot. Still out of sight beneath the window, the sniper squeezes off a pinpoint shot, felling the gunman as the rest of the team advances into the room.

The system, invented by two Israelis, both senior former combat and special units officers, is currently being used by the U.S. armed forces, with the Israeli Defense Forces units soon to introduce the apparatus. Armies from 15 other countries are also testing the system, according to Amos Golan and Asaf Nadel, who co-founded the device along with retired IDF Brigadier General and Chief Intelligence Officer Doron Tamir.

“I believe that the Corner Shot weapon system can be extremely beneficial in the global war on terror. It protects soldiers’ lives and increases their chances of survival, while drastically improving their ability to gather information and transmit the combat scenario as well as pinpoint and engage targets out of their line of sight,” Golan told ISRAEL21c.

Golan, a former anti-terror unit commander, together with Nadel and the Corner Shot team hosted a group of some 50 local and international journalists at an Israeli firing range last month, putting the weapon through its paces in live-fire simulated assaults on a mock terrorist hideout.

“Today’s combat situations, especially in low intensity conflicts, involve fighting in urban terrain, and inside inhabited buildings, forced entry into airplanes, buses or trains,” says Golan. “This unnecessarily exposes security forces to the enemy and presents an immediate risk to their lives. Corner Shot removes the need for this initial exposure. The Americans are very interested in this. I believe from what I have seen and heard that it can be a big success in Iraq because the Americans are dealing with an urban area there.”

Able to pivot the barrel independently from the stock up to 63 degrees to the left or right, the device allows the sniper to hide behind a corner or obstacle while aiming and firing.

Nadel, himself a former commander in the Armored Corps and Secret Service, says, “The Corner Shot system is designed in a way that enables security forces to engage targets from the left, and right, from the front, up or down, and to move to each of these shooting positions very rapidly without the removal of hands from the weapon. This shortens reaction time and increases accuracy in sudden engagement situations. The weapon system can be triggered completely from behind cover.”

The device’s shooting range is accurate and effective to 100 meters in 9mm, 40, and 45-caliber pistols, and is effective to 200 meters with a 5.7mm-caliber pistol, according to the inventors.

Able to host a wide array of pistols, including the Baretta 92F, a model widely used by US security forces, the Glock, SIG, SAUER and CZ, the mechanism can also mount various accessories such as detachable cameras, audio/video transmission kits, visible and IR lasers and tactical flashlights, silencers and rubber bullets.

Future versions will be mountable on the US M-16 and a European joint assault weapon.
The system can also be remotely emplaced and operated from behind camouflage, with a wire video – out connection sending images to a commander at a distance or saved to a 2-hour ‘flash memory’ chip attached to the gunstock.

Golan says the German military designed a primitive weapon in the 1930s for shooting around corners using a static curved barrel on a Schmeisser machine gun, with little success. The US Federal Bureau of Investigations also developed an abortive experimental gun-camera device in the 1960s.

Detailing a bit of the process behind the design of the made-in-Israel weapons system, Golan says there are some 200 parts to the assembly, using 13 to 15 plastic molds, with the parts and construction processes all ISO rated. “This is a device that can be manufactured all over the world, on short notice,” he says, adding that a country looking to purchase “a few thousand, and they want to do it themselves – no problem.”

Headquartered in Coral Gables, Florida with R&D and manufacturing facilities in Israel, Corner Shot developed the system three years ago, and began marketing the device three months ago.

“I decided because since the device is used to save lives, the price had to be low,” Golan told the group.

Although declining to quote exact prices and the not-so-gun shy clientele, Golan says the U.S. patented weapons system is currently in use in the U.S., Europe, Russia and several other countries, with Great Britain’s SAS anti-terror squads also reportedly eyeing the system. According to Golan, weapons systems run between $3,000 to $5,000 per unit depending on the components requested.

More on Innovation