Even better would be a shotgun, or using a musket to fire bird-shot. At close range this is quite deadly and little chance of tracing the shot to a particular weapon.
Malthus, it isn’t a whoosh. I’ve heard it referenced at least a half-dozen times from different docents in widely-divergent locations around the country. If the fire goes out, and you can’t find the flint, and you’re starting to freeze, where is the nearest flint? Given how many people manage to shoot themselves and others accidentally these days, you have to figure that people were just as stupid and/or clumsy 200 years ago.
If it was loaded as a matter of course, who in their right mind would use it to light the fireplace?
Somebody who is drunk. Somebody who is stupid. Somebody who is desperate.
It’s interesting to note that as rates of gun ownership have gone up, rates of accidental shootings have gone down. Our ancestors may have lived with guns as a more integral part of their daily lives than most of us, but there is plenty of evidence that they were actually more careless and too casual in their gun-handling than we are today.
Someone who is freezing.
Flints can be removed/replaced in a matter of seconds. Which I would think would also make them more convenient to use.
I have known several re-enactors and docents personally, and they differ tremendously with respect to the reliability of their info. IME many will not let a small thing like accuracy get in the way of a good yarn.
And the hijacking we are engaging in in no way negates the OP’s question. A musket would make a quite adequate murder weapon, even if used as a club.
The term musket is applied, almost exclusively, to military weapons. So, quite likely the weapon could be fitted with a bayonet, giving a further option for murdering someone. In the days of flintlock muskets, use of the bayonet was part of the main show too. Not like today, when a unit using their bayonets in combat actually makes the news world-wide.
Packing A Musket
by Jerri Blank
When you work from the home
and Johns call on the phone
you’re a call girl
When you walk til you limp
and give a cut to a pimp
you’re a street whore
When they’re beggin you please
to get down on your knees
near their groinage
excusa’ me, but you see
do not touch where they pee
without coinage
The long rifle, or Kentucky long rifle as it’s known to most people, certainly existed in colonial America and they were pretty accurate. Even with a smoothboore musket I bet if I get within 20 yards of my target he’s going to be very worried if I decide to shoot at him.
Marc
…
Well, aren’t I quite the fount of misinformation in this thread!
Just spoke with the household arms expert, and he assures me that although it is easy to remove the flint, it would be much easier to simply use it in the lock to spark a fire. He says his understanding is that that method of starting fires was quite common, at least among colonial forces in Boston (presumably using unloaded weapons!)
I’d better check outta this thread!
Most of my detective expertise comes from Veronica Mars, but wouldn’t it be a lot easier to identify where the bullet comes from because it’s a musket? Unless it happens at a smoothbore shoot-off, I’d bet that Musket Steve, that guy who owns the musket was involved.
This made me think about how good a murder weapon a musket would be today – in terms of forensic science and being able to link the gun and the owner to the murder.
Let’s see – no firing pin mark on the cartridge, no rifling marks on the bullet… I dunno, it might not be possible to definitively link the gun to the bullet, but I don’t know enough science to be sure.
Of course, you the murderous musket owner would be put in a position of arguing that another angry musket owner came along and fired the fatal shot. Maybe not the most compelling arguement… would only work for OJ and the dream team.
A couple of months ago, Mrs Geek was reading “Little House on the Prairie” to the Geeklings. When they got to a part about flintlock rifles, Mrs Geek asked me to explain a few parts of the book since she wasn’t familiar with the terminology. I happen to have an old toy flintlock gun from when I was a kid, and after fumbling around in the attic for a bit I was able to find it. I showed the kids what the various parts were and basically how the thing was loaded and shot.
In the book, they described how they loaded the gun and kept it ready to fire, but were careful to lower the hammer so that the gun wouldn’t fire. When Mrs Geek tried to do the same with the toy gun, she accidentally fired it (it’s just a toy, it didn’t actually fire anything, but the hammer went down and it went “click”), which really reinforced the bit in the book about how they had to carefully lower the hammer.
Anyway, the relevant point here is that the book very clearly described that they kept the gun loaded and ready to fire (except that the hammer wasn’t pulled back) pretty much at all times. I think they were worried about bears and Indians. Since the book is based on the very real memories of Laura Ingalls Wilder, this isn’t just a bit of fiction. I would assume that they, and many other frontier families, really did keep a loaded rifle ready to fire.
I can’t imagine anyone in the more “civilized” eastern areas keeping a gun ready to fire, though.
Kentucky long rifles had a reputation for being good out to a hundred yards or so even when used by a relatively inexperienced shooter. An experienced shooter could pick off someone at three or four times that distance. They were hardly “laughable” (to use the OP’s description). Sure, you only get one shot and then you have to wait a good 20 seconds while reloading, but whoever you are pissed off at better be a heck of a lot farther away than 20 yards if he doesn’t want to be extremely worried about that one first shot.
Depends on how much the lead ball fragments when it hits. If it doesn’t fragment that much (due to the distance fired and the tissue it hits, etc) then I’d say they have a pretty good chance of matching it up to the gun that fired it. Those old muskets were all hand made, one by one. There are bound to be numerous imperfections in the “smooth” inside of the gun barrel which would easily transfer to the lead ball.
Even today, most gun murders are at very close range. The inaccuracy of a musket at long ranges wouldn’t be much of a factor.
If you want to ask about the presence of guns comapred to the murder rate,consider Switzerland, where every able-bodied male is required to have a fully-automatic “assualt rifle” in his home or place of business. And the Swiss have a very very low murder rate.
Of course, that might be because they are Swiss. 
Yeah, guns don’t kill people, Americans kill people.
Tris
People are always getting this wrong. There is no law that requires an able-bodied male to have an assault rifle at their home.
What does happen in Switzerland is, if you are doing your military service, you keep your assault rifle at home in between your tours of duty (starting with approx. 4 months boot camp when you’re 19 or 20, and successive tours of duty approx. 2 weeks every other year until you’re past 40). If you are in the military but aren’t issued an assault rifle (e.g. my father was in an army band and also a medic so he only had a bayonet at home; an officer might be issued a side-arm pistol but not an assault rifle) or are not in the military (e.g. my cousin who was a conscientious objector so he served a civilian prison term of 6 months and was then exempt from military duty) you obviously won’t have any military-issue assault rifle at home.