01-14-2013, 08:18 PM
Fillar Wrote:Actually, many back then had more able rifles than the military. The great Kentucky flintlock-hunting rifle was more accurate than any known previous firearm. It was rifled and used a form of bullet over the traditional ball. The Red Coats would avoid fights instead of going up against the Kentucky (& some Tennessee) Frontiersman.
For those using the statement “that our Founding Fathers never intended for the masses to have military style weapons”, are absolutely false as many had better arms than the colonial military.
The reasons that the musket was used over rifles by the regular army was because it was cheaper and more robust, many malitia used their hunting rifles and became the first snipers to be prominent in war shooting officers before the infantry was even positioned for volley fire the officers avoided such fights as the were primary targets and in the era the musket was superior to the rifle when used in volley virtually useless in the hands of a loan solider also rifles of the era came with their own bullet mold as every rifle was built by hand the the bores of said rifles varied quite a bit from gun to gun so it was not a practical military arm from a logistics standpoint until the minie ball was developed in 1848 similarly the high power hunting rifles most of use have are for all intensive purposes sniper rifles which far exceeded the accuracy and range of a rack grade m4 but from a volume of fire stand point the m4 is a more practical military weapon for intermediate range similar to the comparison of a Brown Bess to a Kentucky rifle the Bess could be fired faster and many more times then the kentucky before it became fouled beyond use rifling had been around for about 250 years prior to the American revolution it just was not a practical weapon for large military's of the time