"In 1987, Max Atchisson sold the rights of the AA-12 to Jerry Baber of Military Police Systems, Inc., Piney Flats, Tennessee.[3] MPS in turn developed the successor simply known as Auto Assault-12, which was redesigned over a period of 18 years with 188 changes and improvements to the original blueprint, modifications included changing the AA-12 from blowback- to gas-operated with a locked breech." [0]

Looks like there was a bit of exaggeration going on, but not anything terribly out of line.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atchisson_Assault_Shotgun

I imagine the recoil would have been ungovernable in the original blowback configuration and the reciprocating mass would have been relatively huge.

Read further in the Wikipedia article, the first sentence in the 'History' section is

> In 1987, Max Atchisson sold the rights of the AA-12 to Jerry Baber of Military Police Systems, Inc., Piney Flats, Tennessee

Quoting the New Yorker in full

>[...]he started producing, from start to finish, his own weapon: a fully automatic shotgun called the AA-12.

it is obvious that he was the first to produce a mass market ready model. The article doesn't claim that he invented it.

The article covers that. The original design was done by Atchisson, then sold to Baber, who improved on it.

> What?

Expecting someone who writes for the New Yorker to understand how firearms work is, I think, expecting rather too much.

Based on sibling comments, that's also too much to expect of several HN readers. (Hint: shells don't leave by the front door.) I thought the most egregious howler was this one:

...a dainty, short-haired woman in high heels casually grips the gun and fires off eight hundred balls of .20-calibre [sic] metal in four seconds...

Although this is pretty bad, it would have been worse if the "balls" were described as 20-gauge as the author intended rather than 20-caliber which is just silly.

T buckshot is .20-caliber while 00 is .32-caliber.