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As I read it here, there appears to be some notion that there is some British "law" that governed gun weight. As far as I can tell, nothing of the sort existed, only a tradition {which in English gunmaking as well as society at-large had the strength of "law"} that more or less established expectations among gun buyers. Those expectations caused the gunmakers to build guns of certain weights. A "vicious circle" or "the cycle of life" depending on your perspective...

Having said that, the market did have something to do with it. A gun too heavy, or one that didn't handle lively enough, or a gun that beat the livin' beejeebers out of a guy for no good purpose would be at a competitive disadvantage against another gun of the same caliber that performed in some "better" way built by a different gunmaker.

I do believe there is a notion that "marketplace competition" was, to many of the British gunmakers, a motivating force too pedestrian or uncivilized or "below the high standards" of British gunmaking and maybe there is some truth to that notion. I have even read in print that the British gunmakers felt they "knew better" than their buyers and at times this led to the making of guns that simply didn't sell. Hard to say since it was the destruction of the British economy {in my opinion} that put paid to British gunmaking though the Germans and Americans had already been whittling away at the British gun industry for over a generation before WW2. In ARC, John Taylor had some suggestions and critiques of certain guns along these lines and reading between the lines gives the impression to me that he both respected the judgments of the gunmakers and found them lacking at times.

Such notions of caliber-requiring-certain-weight never applied to American gunmaking at all. American gunmakers have always unabashedly tramped after the market, always possessed a great deal of daring to risk trial and error in the maretplace to see what might give them an edge over the competition. Thus you will find, for example, double gun weights from the late-1800's that are all over the map, some light, some very heavy {depending entirely on purpose and cost of construction/technology of construction}. And while the British were perfecting the double gun and single loader {American interpretation: "stuck in the rut of outdated technology limiting their ability to penetrate the marketplace of the masses"}, American gunmakers were testing every breechloading contraption conceivable, never guided or hindered by any rule at all except the rule that "if it pays it stays".

There must be something essentially "human" about the weights of British heavy caliber rifles, though, as it appears that as the dust has settled, the common weights of those guns of the first quarter of the 20th century seem to be the target weights even of modern American gunmakers. Witness the lack of interest by the market in Art Alphin's elephantine series of Hannibal-whatever rifles of the late '80's/'90's. Such obesities have never taken over the market and neither have the anorexic super-lights using carbon-fibre stocks, titanium actions and muzzle breaks.

So in the final analysis it seems to me what was created and accepted on the anvil of British tradition has been proven in the furnace of the American marketplace.

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