I has a weird dream last night, where someone was carrying an antiquated firearm called a blunderbuss :
It was an interesting visual, but I don’t remember much from that dream.
Well, anyway, it got me to thinking – just how effective was the blunderbuss
as a weapon? Could you reliably kill someone with it at a distance? Or did you
need to be very close for it to be effective?
Any info would be appreciated!
Aimed at a group of men, on the deck of a ship, just a few feet away and I would say it’s the right tool for the job.
Yeah, I figured that the effect from just a few feet away would be pretty devastating!
A blunderbuss is just a primitive shotgun. The effective range of modern shotguns is fairly short compared to rifles and they have the advantage of modern powder and shells. The blunderbuss used black powder and, more importantly, did not use shells with carefully packaged shot pellets. The shot was packed in the barrel before each shot. The effective lethal range would have been much lower than a shotgun. I would guess that it wouldn’t cause lethal damage past 20 yards or so even if it was aimed at a person.
That would entirely depend on the size of the shot and the amount of powder. If a large piece of shot hits you in the head, you may well be dead.
Did the OP see the movie “Looper”? 
Obviously, they weren’t really blunderbusses* but they were called that in the movie because they resembled one (short and stocky) and had a similar range. IIRC, one of the characters says something like “you can’t hit anything beyond 15 feet, and you can’t miss anything within 15 feet.”
*Typed out, it doesn’t look like a real word. 
Blunderbi?
/dog Latin
In combat, I expect that lethality isn’t the absolute minimum requirement. A disabling hit from a shot ball would probably be good enough, especially in the heat of a boarding action where the primary weapon was a blade or cudgel of some type (cutlass, bayonet, club, gunstock, etc.). Knocking down several adversaries and being able to rush them to engage in melee at an advantage would be fine reason to sweep the decks with blunderbusses.
The bell doesn’t really give extra spread, it just made reloading with improvised “shot” faster & easier. It also added to the “scary’ factor.
Most of these were just 10ga black powder shotguns. Sometimes if the shooter ran out of a cartridge load he could just scoop nails or pebbles or whatever and fire it.
Interesting point!
Blunderbera. Third declension dog Latin.
But the root is Greek, so properly, it’s “blunderbode.”
In reality it’s from the Dutch donderbus, from donder, thunder + bus, tube, corrupted into English blunderbuss, “perhaps with some allusion to its blind or random firing” says OED.
Of course, but there’s nothing proper about dog Latin.
‘This is my Boom Stick.’
“Boomstick? Did you just say Boomstick? That, my friend, is a WInchester 30-06!” (Gary Larsen)
In addition to shipboard use, they were customarily carried by 18th C. British stagecoach staff as a defense against highwaymen, ISTR.
You should watch Lock N Load with R Lee Ermy. He had an episode on shotguns that started with the blunderbuss. Pretty good.
I think its on netflix.
I’ll have to watch that sometime!