Saw this during the night on PBS!!!
My OG!
How noble is that, kids?
(or am I missing something?;))
Quasi
I thought that he DID fire, but deliberately missed Burr by a mile.
He seems to have hoped Burr’s sense of honor would be satisfied by that gesture. Needless to say, it WASN’T.
PBS said he didn’t astorian.
I think it’s one of those DVD’S one can buy…
What struck me as being so noble was the letter to his wife…
My OG, what a MAN!
Q
Hamilton fired first! 
Then WHY does PBS have it wrong??
Or maybe I heard it wrong.
If so, my apologies, but the letter?
Did I at least get THAT right???
Q
According to this documentary, he never fired.
I’m sorry. I’m just trying to get things back to normal…
I could swear that I read some time ago that…well, let me back up.
Popular myth, apparently, was that Hamilton fired well over Burr’s head, after which Burr fired his fatal shot. Most folks, so the story goes, believe that Hamilton missed intentionally, hoping to end the duel honorably with no one injured, and that Burr took advantage and struck Hamilton down in cold blood.
However, I recall reading some years back that the pistols used in the duel were examined, leading to a surprising discovery: Hamilton’s pistol (or possibly both, I can’t recall) had been modified. The trigger had been specially crafted to go off with something like a half pound of pressure, significantly less than the 10 or so pounds usually required for a trigger pull. In other words, Hamilton had intended to cheat. But because the trigger required such a light pull, it had gone off prematurely, which is why Hamilton’s bullet had whizzed over Burr’s head.
And a quick search finds this old article from Smithsonian magazine that backs me up.
I don’t understand how a hair trigger would be an advantage in a duel. It wasn’t a Hollywood-Western duel, where you draw and fire. It was a turn-taking exercise.
According to Founding Brothers, Hamilton’s men insist Hamilton intended to miss; Burr’s men insisted he didn’t intend to miss. The simplest explanation is that both sides were telling the truth. Hamilton intended to miss, but didn’t make it as obvious as he could have, firing overhead instead of toward the river or something.
Incidentally, Hamilton, delirious in the boat afterward, also warned his men to be careful with his pistol because he believed it was still loaded. Is it possible the hair-trigger surprised him too?
If it’s “still loaded,” doesn’t that mean he didn’t fire? They didn’t have multi-shot pistols then, did they?
Well, yes, but he was delirious - he’d been shot. He was wrong (unless the PBS documentary is right, which I haven’t seen), but I wonder if some of his confusion was because the gun went off when he didn’t mean for it too.
My assumption would be that a lighter trigger would be easier to fire quickly and more accurately - not in a cowboy draw-and-shoot sort of way, just holding your hand steady and applying pressure - less likely to move…
Yup. Competetive target shooters make this sort of modification often, for exactly that reason. The effort of pulling the trigger can cause your grip to flex which, in turn, moves the gun. Crazy-light trigger pulls effectively eliminate that effect.
The more accurately part is correct. Almost all competitions have a minimum trigger pull to even the field and provide for safety.
ETA: What Inigo said, how did I miss that?
I was of the understanding that one of the pistols involved was converted to percussion-fire sometime in the later 19th Century (according to my copy of Fired In Anger: The Personal Handguns of American Heroes and Villains, anyway- I see the linked article confirms that too), and no-one was sure which gun was whose.
Certainly, I was of the belief that Hamilton had deloped (deliberately aimed off) but the “accidentally fired too soon” theory is just as plausible.
There were multi-shot guns in 1804, but not pistols (with the exception of a few double-barrelled or Nock gun models) FWIW.
So that would make Burr Greedo? But wait… Greedo died, so Burr must be Han Solo. Only Han Solo fired first, so Hamilton must be Solo. But Solo didn’t get dead; Greedo did! OK, now you’ve gotten me confused. 
Depends on just what you think it means to be honorable, I suppose. From Wiki:
I should mention for those of you following along at home that “Deloping” was considered an… undesirable practice in some circles as it basically said to your opponent “You’re not worth the bullet.”
There were, of course, many duels in which both participants deloped by “Gentlemen’s Agreement”; honour was satisfied (as the duel had taken place), and no-one got hurt or killed.
In the end though, Hamiliton really won. He is known as one of the founding brothers and held in esteem by the general public, and Aaron Burr is only known because he killed Hamilton, thanks to the milk commercial.
Wait a minute. Your founding fathers duelled? Ours were just drunk.