Introduction to Historical Shooting

At its simplest level, historical shooting refers to shooting historical firearms (either antiques or modern replicas) with as much historical verisimilitude as possible using period-correct ammunition, equipment, and shooting techniques in order to understand how they worked.

 Historical shooting falls somewhere between modern target shooting and full-blown living history. In living history, one attempts to portray a person from another period as accurately as possible, both to teach others how that person lived and so that the reenactor himself can learn about it through what is sometimes called “experimental archeology,” and does so across a broad spectrum of life, from clothing to food to entertainment to crafts and more.  Modern target shooting is focused entirely upon getting the best accuracy possible from a given weapon or ammunition with no regard for history if more modern weapons, techniques, or equipment will produce a better result.

Historical shooting focuses exclusively on a single aspect of living history—the use of arms—and is less focused on an accurate portrayal of life in period and more on the functional use of those weapons.  Likewise, while a historical shooter should be concerned with accurate shooting, he is entirely focused upon using historically correct weapons, ammunition, equipment, and techniques, and should never allow modern elements of the sport to influence his shooting.  Thus, a historical shooter can justly ignore whether a given piece of his kit is exactly correct for his impression except as it relates to the use of his weapons so long as it has no significant effect on his shooting.  For example, if one is shooting a Civil War rifle, he might think it important to carry a canteen of that period in order to understand how doing so interferes with his ability to shoot well, but might not be terribly concerned about whether or not that canteen is of the exact style for any given year or unit of the War as long as it is functionally similar.  Likewise, the historical shooter should not use a modern bullet type or powder formulation in the hopes of improving the accuracy of his fire.

Historical shooting revolves around three things.  First, good quality, functional firearms which are either original or else accurate reproductions of the originals; second, shooting equipment, and possibly clothing, which functions in much the same way as the originals did, especially with regard to encumbrance and restriction of movement; and third, the careful and attentive reliance upon the shooting manuals, either civilian or military, of the period.

The inspiration for this blog was the work by Rob “Enfield” (apparently a nom de plume) of the British Muzzleloaders YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/britishmuzzleloaders/featured), which explores historical shooting with British and Empire weapons of the Victorian era.  The videos include, among other things, analyses of the way in which British load-bearing equipment, period-correct ammunition, firing positions, and target practices from authentic military manuals affected accuracy and rate of fire and how the weapons themselves impacted history.

As a newcomer to black powder firearms and as someone who has been active in highly authentic living history (albeit of a different period) for many years, Mr. Enfield’s channel had a significant impact on me:  I realized I did not just want to learn to use historical weapons, I wanted to learn how they were used in period and why they were used that way.  This blog will include essays relating to the historical use of military weapons from the American Civil War and Victorian England, including pistols, carbines, rifled muskets, and rifles.  It will focus on the weapons themselves, the ammunition, the equipment used with them, and on historical methods of shooting.