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When Did the Shotgun Become a Shotgun

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shaman

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This was asked on another forum, and my answer was a bit backhanded. What I explained was that the idea of a dedicated shotgun only came about because of the growing use of rifling. A rifled musket was lousy for throwing shot. However, I was left wondering: When did folks start calling a type of smoothbore firearm a shotgun?
 
The term shotgun is complimentary to the terms handgun and rifle-gun. Few are aware they all are acronyms related to their hunting use…

SHOTgun - Something Hovering Over There gun. Popular for birds and squirrels.

RIFLE-gun - Required In Forest Lands Everywhere gun. Preferred by big game hunters.

HANDgun - Hunting Any Nearby Delicacy gun. Useful for those closeup tasty critters that don’t require a shotgun or rifle gun.


And with that I end my terrible attempt at a dad joke.
 
It was originally developed in Japan, called a Shogun in honor of the warrior class.
But Emporer Takesashitza said they need to add a T in his honor, so you got the name ShoTgun.
Don’t yall read history?
Admiral Perry brought the name back to the west.
This is a very interesting story. Some might have trouble believing, but not me.
 
Joker Jokes.jpg


The actual scholarly information was good, but some of the other stuff..... and it was a sincere question guys....

LD
 
With the improvement of black powder the shotgun has we know today with short barrels and elevated rib was introduced by John Manton in the 1780,s in flintlock . In 1800 Forsyth developed the scent bottle lock for mostly sporting guns , has for the percussion cap this was made by James Rowntree who was approached by Joshua Shaw to build a sxs gun using his idea of a percussion cap . This Rowntree did the caps were made of steel which were re used with new fultimate this was approximately1815 before Joshua Shaw emigrated to America in 1817 aboard the ship Electra
The shotgun has we know do day is mostly due to the improvement of black powder the long barrels were known has fowlers these gun used a coarse grain of powder which needed a long barrel to burn the powder for it to reach its maximum strength.
Feltwad

long fowler
P1010011.JPG

Flintlock sporting gun
100_4832.JPG

Percussion gun
100_3026.JPG
 
It probably came about after the Civil War with the development of the cartridge gun as a term to differentiate it from a rifle.

This is not so true. Many, many references to shotguns during the war. Double-barrel shotguns (called that by name in period documents) were used to good effect early in the war by the Conferates, mainly the cavalry.
 
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