Micheal,
Wow, I never expected to have another reply to this thread. I appreciate your time and thought, but unfortunately I am no longer in a good position to work on this project. After a year of interning with the museum, I left and took a job teaching English in China, which is where I am now. Fortunately, I still keep in contact with my friends at the museum, and I am sure they would be excited to see your sources and hear your input, as we were never able to conclusively discover what exactly the gun is. I contacted a few specialists, and I think three people independently said that it is likely Asian in origin. I can send you a link to a small article that I contributed to to with information on the story of the gun, but I don't want to be advertising the museum here in case that violates any rules of either this forum or the museum.
I can also put you in contact with someone at the museum and maybe they will consider looking into it again, although with a small staff and a team of generally inexperienced volunteers, the amount of work they can handle is limited and progress is always slow. They are a great group of people though, at least the ones I knew while I was still there.
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