First appearing in the decade of so before World War One, the Scheintod guns were designed to fire either flash or irritant cartridges, not lethal projectiles. The word “scheintod”, in fact, translates to something along the lines of “apparent death”, as in something that looks lethal but actually isn’t. They would remain popular as self-defense weapons through the 1920s, and were made in a wide variety of configurations. This one is a particularly large example, with 5 chambers nearly 3 inches in length. It would have fired a round of red pepper, tobacco powder, or other eye and nose irritants.
If you speak German how accurate is Ian’s translation of Scheintod?
Rough literal translation could also be phrased as “seems deadly”. The concept is there. German compound words are pretty wiggly.
To compare another well known german phrase, Zeitgeist has a literal translation as time ghost or time spirit, to imply the actual meaning of general state of social consciousness at a particular time; scheintod seems relatively tame compared to that one.
(And also implies that the idea of spirit to mean both ghost and your own mood or temperament stretches back pretty far, which makes sense)