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Holy Cow Look at this Duck Getter
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He would then paddle w/little ping-pong looking paddles out to where the ducks were sitting on the water...and you can figure out the rest...[:0][:D]
It wasn't for sport it was for money and/or food hunters. It's illegal now.
I hunt for the sport but the food taste good too [:)]
... you also have to remember there were about a bizillion ducks in those days and only 20-30 million 'Mericans! Few actually saw the problem of over hunting in those days - I think they were considered and treated as Liberals, today.[8D]
"In the 1880s, at the height of hunting of waterfowl for commercial purposes, market hunters used large bore shotguns of domestic manufacture. The hunters mounted these cannon-like punt guns on the bow of a flat-bottomed duck boat, called a punt. They poled the boat quietly, at night, close to a flock of ducks resting on the water and fired a large load of shot and powder that killed many ducks at once. Used in tandem, a group of hunters could bag five hundred ducks per day.
Federal Laws banned punt guns, market hunting, and the fashion feather trade by 1920, after much of the wild bird population was decimated from decades of over-hunting.
The punt gun pictured on this page is a muzzle loader that looks crude in design, much like an iron pipe with a rough wooden stock strapped onto it. It weighs almost a hundred pounds, so it would have been mounted on a boat or nestled on padding against the stern and discharged. "
http://www.museum.state.il.us/RiverWeb/harvesting/harvest/waterfowl/tools_techniques/guns/punt_gun.html
Margaret Thatcher
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
Mark Twain
Physics being what Physics is, I'd want something heavy if I was going to shoot a shotgun as big as this one appears. Objects at rest and all that jazz.
Maybe is was used with a swivel and a gun pit like in Chesapeake Bay?
That's a punt gun from a much earlier time, it is a crude looking flintlock. I've read of punt guns as large as 2 gauge. The subject gun here is way too large for wing shooting geese, it is a smaller commercial gun.
Sorry to correct you but that's a percussion ignition and not a flintlock.