Before the Judge, There was the Thunder 5
I bet some of you thought that the Taurus Judge revolver was an earth-shattering innovation when you first saw it. I mean who couldn’t love a five-shot revolver that could hurl either .410 shotgun shells or .45 Long Colt as fast as you could pull the trigger? Well, the thing is the Judge wasn’t first.
The MIL Thunder 5 beat it by more than a decade.
But good luck finding one now.
MIL popped up in 1991 in Piney Flats, TN and made one product, the Thunder 5 revolver. Unlike almost every other firearms company in US history, it’s hard to dig into just who this company was. Manuals for the Thunder 5 are listed as being distributed by Dragun Enterprises with a Murfreesboro PO Box address. SOTs information in the ATF’s archives comes back to Holston Inc., which is another dead end.
I would like to tell you the story behind the gun, but it seems like this one was written on an etch-a-sketch.
But what I DO know about it is in this article at GUNS.com
