Colt even thought of developing an assembly line to manufacture his product. In 1836, Samuel Colt perfected and patented a revolving handgun by bringing together features from previous guns and fashioning them into a mechanically reliable revolver. Colt Walker (aka Walker Colt) This is a counterfeit example of the now-rare Colt Walker percussion revolver photo courtesy NRA Museums This helped to get the public behind the revolution. Nevertheless, small, private rifle makers in the colonies made it possible for the war to begin on good footing for the colonists. George Washington made significant use of snipers, most American revolutionaries were later armed with smoothbore muskets-many of them made in France.
They were comparably expensive to make, and their production rate was slow, as small arms makers produced them one at a time. There were downsides to American Long Rifles.
They used these skills and their rifles’ technology by laying behind rocks and trees and shooting the Red Coats long before they got close enough to use their smoothbore muskets. And those New Englanders were hunters, so they’d learned to be marksmen. They had rifles that could hit a man-sized target at 200 and perhaps 300 yards, whereas the Brown Bess was only accurate to maybe 75 yards. Redcoats were geared for close-quarter engagements between masses of troops, but the Americans at Concord didn’t fight that way. The British preferred the Brown Bess cause it lobbed a big bullet and is faster to load than a muzzleloader with a long rifled barrel-you have to twist a bullet down a rifled barrel, and that takes time. The British had Brown Bess guns-smoothbore muskets. However, one small but important fact few learn is some of the colonists actually had more advanced arms than the British troops. They are also taught that an initial confrontation on the Lexington town green started the fight that led to a British retreat from a large force of Americans at Concord. And they learn that Paul Revere and others sounded the alarm and that Colonial militiamen mobilized to confront the Redcoat column. School kids learn that on the night of April 18, 1775, hundreds of British troops marched from Boston to nearby towns. It and many others shown here can be seen in the National Firearms Museum in Fairfax, Va.
American Long Rifle This flintlock Long Rifle has been dated to 1780.