Once the fire goes off it completely spews the rear pellet wad forth, and the sound is like a bomb that can be heard for five hundred or more paces. — History of Song, 1259

That's the moment. A projectile that occludes the bore, gas pressure builds, projectile exits with authority — that's not a flamethrower anymore, that's a gun. Everything from your carry piece to a 1,000-yard precision rifle traces back to someone in 1259 figuring out you needed to seal the bore. Every time you're troubleshooting a squib or thinking about headspace, you're dealing with the same physics these guys stumbled into.

Mongol soldiers feared the fire lance specifically, even while holding other Jin weapons in lower regard

That detail sticks with me. The Mongols were rolling over everything in front of them — cavalry, fortifications, combined armies — and they had a specific fear response to fire lances. A weapon doesn't have to be accurate or reliable to be psychologically effective. Anyone who's been around a .44 Magnum at an indoor range knows that sound and concussion do work on their own.

In 1257, Song official Li Zengbo was dispatched to inspect frontier arsenals and found conditions alarming... "no more than 85 iron bomb-shells, large and small, 95 fire-arrows, and 105 fire-lances" — which he described as woefully inadequate for even a hundred men to defend against a serious attack.

Some things don't change. A garrison inspector in 13th-century China writing up a "we're critically understocked" report reads exactly like every armorer's inventory complaint since. The weapons evolved, the logistics complaints stayed identical.

What's the oldest firearm — or type of firearm — you've personally handled, and did the age of the thing change how you thought about shooting it?

Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team