Shooting the Paddle Butt Wheellock Carbine from Rifle Shoppe Castings

The invention of the wheellock in Europe can be placed at about 1500. There is a vocal group of scholars who believe Leonardo da Vinci was the inventor. Drawings made by Leonardo of a wheellock mechanism date (depending on the authority) from either the mid-1490s or the first decade of the 16th century. However, a drawing from a book of German inventions (dated 1505) and a 1507 reference to the purchase of a wheellock in Austria may indicate the inventor was an unknown German mechanic instead. In 1517 and 1518, the first gun control laws banning the wheellock were proclaimed by the Emperor Maximilian I, initially in Austria and later throughout the Holy Roman Empire. Several Italian states followed suit in the 1520s and 1530s, another argument used by the pro-German camp. As Lisa Jardine relates in her account of the assassination of William the Silent of the Netherlands, in 1584, the small size, ease of concealment and user-friendly loading aspect of the wheellock, compared to larger and more cumbersome hand-held weapons, meant that it was used for the killing of public figures, such as Francis, Duke of Guise and William himself. Jardine also argues that a stray wheellock pistol shot may have been responsible for the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of French Huguenots in 1572 Wheellock pistols were in common use during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) on both sides for cavalry and officers. Around 1650 the flintlock began to replace the wheellock as it was cheaper and easier to use than the wheellock. Wheel-lock firearms were never mass-produced for military purposes, but the best preserved armoury collection at the Landeszeughaus in Graz, Austria, contains over 3,000 examples, many of which were produced in small batches for military units. #apex #history #civilwar #cod #rdr2 #gunhistory #cowboys #ww2 #englishcivilwar #wheelock #gtavi