We have a club guest day every month - alternating Saturdays and Sundays. I average nine year, given that in an ordinary year we are OOC for at least three of them. However, with covid cutting down our opportunities to travel back home to Canada or to Oregon, the last two years, when not in lock-down, have seen me at every guest day. I ALWAYS take one or two muzzleloaders and a couple of other guns that use BP, but are not muzzleloaders, just so that folks can see and feel the commotion that accompanies BP shooting, and maybe get dirty and smelly along with that.
Those exposed to my BP guns have usually not only never handled, let alone fired any kind of a real gun before, but may have never thought about what came before cartridges, and to say it's an eye-opener is an understatement.
A couple have asked me about getting started with shooting BP, and I advise them that here in UK, with so many restrictions, it's best to get full membership of a gun club first, which is, in any case compulsory if you want own and shoot a rifled firearm. There is no easy way, except maybe by getting a shotgun certificate - that entails far less stringent conditions, provided that you have somewhere to shoot, like Britsmoothy does. Live in a town or city? Hmmmmmm, that's a tricky one - okay for a modern arm, with lots of clay pigeon clubs around, but for somebody who wants to shoot a flintlock or percussion smoothy, as hard as it can be. Living in the country makes it a lot easier - many people have a shotgun of some kind, so having a flinter or percussion gun should be no no big deal, except they don't usually do it. Only 'odd people' like Britsmoothy, bless 'im, do, and they are very few and far between. Some here have often asked about deer-hunting with BP firearms. It just doesn't happen, mainly because of the combination of velocity and muzzle energy figures that are deemed necessary to ensure a human kill. I KNOW, and you KNOW, that a well-placed .45cal ball will drop a deer in its paw-prints, but here in Western Europe, apart from one specialist reserved area in Hungary, all that seem to have been forgotten.
With no Scouting organisation here that supports shooting, and no other youth shooting opportunities, we are a bit stuck to go fanfaring to the youth of today, and let's be honest, here in UK the youngsters who go to game fairs and the like are far different to those who live in towns or cities. With shooting parent or parents, they are already 75% of the way to 'our' kind of shooting.
Else you can just about forget it.
