Title :

History of the Shotgun

Category: Shotguns and Smoothbores

The shotgun has become the most popular choice of weapon also called scattergun and pepergun for many hunters, the wild west and in a lot of old western movies and police cars. Here is the story of how the shotgun as we know it came into existence.
After the years of the musket, working with the belief that a long barrel made the bullet go farther, gun makers created the Fowler, A shooting weapon that was lighter than a musket, but came with very long barrels. The Fowler could have a barrel that could easily be 6ft in length.
A little while after the Fowler was created, some people cut down the barrel and figured out that a shorter barrel would make the shot scatter, cumming out of the barrel sooner and was much more deadly and easier to carry, than the fowler's long barrel gun. The Blunderbuss would be born. The Blunderbuss could have as short as a 9 inch barrel, this was the short version of the fowler. A favorite for the Queens Royal Navy, was the Blunderbuss and all others that sailed the seas at the time.
In time the Blunderbuss and the Fowler would became better known as shotguns due to the type of ammunition they shot. In 1793 Joseph Manton, manufactured a double-barreled shotgun in London. Manton's guns were well balanced, sleek, light, easy to handle, and flawless finished and craftsmanship. The Stocks were slender and of fine picked English walnut with a hand rubbed oil finish. These guns were the beginnings for the established British fine crafted shotguns for wing shooting that has is still being done today.
The double barrel shotgun was manufactured making a better gun that had two shots before they had to reload ammo. You could shoot two shoots separately to give the person a better chance of defense, or together for a better chance of defending ones self.
A man named Lenderhaux during the Civil War, created the open up shotgun. He wanted to figure out a new way that was easier to load his shotgun and as a result, he also created self contained cartridges with a pin that would stick out of it, and would get hit by the hammer and ignite the charge. This was a huge advantage for the Union army, as the Confederacy army didn't have the resources to make the cartridges.
John Moses Browning lived from January 23, 1855 to November 26, 1926, he was born in Ogden, Utah the United States, he was an firearms designer. invented a 6-shot lever-action shotgun which with combined the best features of a lever action rifle and a shotgun. After that Brownings next invention was the ever-popular pump-action shotgun. He is one the most important figure in the development of modern automatic and semi-automatic firearms and is credited with 128 gun patents.