Punt Guns

[Pran]

A blunderbuss is a close ranged weapon, the belled muzzle is supposed to open up the shot pattern to make it more effective against multiple opponents.

Thanks Mark.

[art_collector]

The punt gun was amazing but so were the babes whose pictures were splashed on the site...

Nice post

[john.s]

Results with Punt Guns were not so dramatic as thought. In a whole days of work hardly a shot or two could be fired. It was never a very effective wildfowling method.

A punt gun works up to 100 yards at most, 80 better.

Ducks are a naturally wary species, do not imagine that punt boats could easily approach them to this distance.

There was no who;esome murder.

We did have a punt gun of 1 and 1/2 bore in Baktiarpore. Its major use was to fire a blank round of black powder ammo during the month of Ramadan to announce the end of fasting. As for ducks in the Ganges, they had learned fast to laugh at the punt boat.

This is why stealth, skill, camoflage and patience is required in wildfowling on the wings. An extremely skilled sport.

lots of people think using a puntgun is "mass killing" , it is not , it is the "hardest discipline" of all the sports and old arts here in the UK , i have praticed punting for quite a few years and this year for example , has been the hardest , i have not yet mannaged to fire a shot

[arbab]

A punt gun is a type of extremely large shotgun used in the 19th and 20th centuries for shooting large numbers of waterfowl for commercial harvesting operations. Punt guns were usually custom-designed and so varied widely, but could have bore diameters exceeding 2 inches and fire over a pound (.5 kilos) of shot at a time.[1] A single shot could kill over 50 waterfowl resting on the water's surface. They were too big to hold and the recoil so large that they were mounted directly on the punts used for hunting, hence their name. Hunters would maneuver their punts quietly into line and range of the flock using poles or oars to avoid startling them. To improve efficiency hunters could work in fleets of up to around ten punts.

In the United States, this practice depleted stocks of wild waterfowl and by the 1860s most states had banned the practice. The Lacey Act of 1900 banned the transport of wild game across state lines, and the practice of market hunting was outlawed by a series of federal laws in 1918. In the United Kingdom, a 1995 survey showed fewer than 50 active punt guns still in use. UK law limits punt guns to a bore diameter of 1.75 inches
Courtesy ~ Wikipedia

[Grumpy]

Arbab, Wikipedia is wrong - AGAIN.
I keep saying this ( but to very little effect ) :
The maximum bore for a shotgun in the UK is 2 inches.

"A shotgun is described as a smooth-bore gun (not being an air-weapon) which has a barrel not less than 24 inches with a bore diameter not exceeding 2 inches.
"
So there.

[john.s]

Arbab, Wikipedia is wrong - AGAIN.
I keep saying this ( but to very little effect ) :
The maximum bore for a shotgun in the UK is 2 inches.

"A shotgun is described as a smooth-bore gun (not being an air-weapon) which has a barrel not less than 24 inches with a bore diameter not exceeding 2 inches.
"
So there.

grumpy ,..........you are correct ,.......you may posses a smooth bore gun , with a bore of not more than 2 inches ,.......you may only use a smooth bore gun with a bore no greater than 1.750 , (an inch and three quarters)

[Grumpy]

Ah.......So you can possess a shotgun with a bore up to 2" but can only use a shotgun with a bore of up to 1 3/4" ?
Oh Gordon Bennet - British firearms bureaucracy gone mad again !
Thanks John.
BTW, you appear to have a novel surname for a Lanky.