On Sun, 24 Apr 2005 02:58:11 GMT, Strider wrote:

When I was a kid living in Maryland I used to love to go down to a =
couple of
museums on the Eastern Shore, where they had about a half-dozen of =
those
"punt guns" that were used to shoot an entire flock of ducks with one =
shot.
The bore varied but I remember several of them around 2" (.200 caliber)=
or
more, with barrels maybe 12 feet long and a regular, very fat shoulder
stock.

That would be a 2 gauge shotgun, not a .200 caliber rifle. ;-)

Using the original English classification it would be an "A" caliber =
punt
gun, which was the largest of them all. The "letter" caliber scale =
followed
the alphabet, each caliber diminishing 1/16" until the "gauge" scale took=
over
with four gauge as the largest.

Another system badly in need of some metrication! g=20
--=20

-JN-