Punt gun
A Punt Gun is an extremely large shotgun shotgun , found the 20th century in the 19th and prospective use. Since these shotguns could not be shot free-standing due to the high recoil forces, they were usually firmly mounted on elongated, flat row boats, so-called punts , after which they were also named.
Construction and use
The punt gun was mostly a one-off production. The barrel diameter of the up to three meters long shotgun was around two inches (51 mm). Around one pound (≈ 0.45 kg) of pellets were shot per shot . A single shot could hit up to 50 waterfowl at the same time. At first it was mainly used for commercial waterfowl hunting.
The archer, lying down in marshland or on shallow water, slowly rowed towards the wild bird population and fired his weapon at the soaring waterfowl from close range.
The success of this hunting method was so resounding that the use of punt guns to protect wild bird populations was regulated by law in the USA and Great Britain as early as the mid-19th century . The influence of well-off hobby hunters from the upper class also came to bear, who viewed commercial hunting as a considerable competitor to their leisure time and feared for their own hunting success. Since 1870, hunting with punt guns has been banned in more and more states in the United States, but as recently as 1876 a hunter boasted of having killed 96 ducks with a single shot in the Horicon Marsh swamps .
In the 20th century hunting with the punt gun changed to a form of hobby hunting. In the period between the First and Second World War , there were around 180 active punt gun shooters, according to the British Sport Shooting Society. As recently as 2017, around a dozen hobby hunters in Great Britain hunted with this weapon, whereby the requirements for nature and species protection are very high.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d Solveig Grothe: Shotgun for three hands. In: Spiegel Online . November 6, 2017. Retrieved November 6, 2017 .