Too expensive for us regular people to be buying at all, much less dragging through the woods! So we’ll set a price limit of $2500 for the guns we’ll be looking at.
They can be extremely expensive, from $5000 upwards into the tens-of-thousands. The higher-end versions of these guns often have fancy woodwork and heavy engraving. Though it would be quite interesting to do a piece on that sort of setup in the future! But they serve a subtly different purpose and are not the focus of this article. I don’t have anything against such guns, and actually like them a great deal. So we are excluding the single-shot rifle/shotguns with a set of swappable single barrels (like the H&R/NEF, Rossi, or Thompson/Center sets) from consideration. It may also be worth pointing out that we are looking for guns that will allow a shooter to leverage the advantages of both a shotgun and a rifle at the same time. Such models include some of the old Winchester and Marlin combinations, and there are surely others that I have never heard of. There are also a few guns that, while they fall into our specifications of what comprises a "regular person’s field gun", were made in such limited quantities that finding them for sale at all is purely a matter of luck that no amount of persistence will overcome. These become a handloading-only proposition. These older guns are also often chambered in weird obsolete european rifle calibers that are very difficult to obtain brass for and no longer available as factory-produced ammunition. They are often chambered for obsolete shotshell lengths of 2 1/2" or 2 9/16", and may even have Damascus shotgun barrels that are only safe to use with black powder shells. But most of these guns are not safe to use with modern ammunition. Every now and then, you will find a very old drilling or cape gun for sale at what seems like a somewhat reasonable price.
Most of these guns, other than some of the two-barreled O/U combinations, are far outside the price range of a regular person’s field gun. I certainly wouldn’t want to carry such a gun on any sort of extended hike, though! These types of guns came about as a result of gun laws that allowed only one firearm per household, and for their utility in european driven hunts. And funflings, well, they are just very rare and extremely weird, typically comprising side-by-side shotgun barrels, with centerfire rifle barrels above and below, and a rimfire barrel in the middle. Vierlings are usually like a drilling, but with a rimfire barrel added above. Most drillings are comprised of two side-by-side shotgun barrels with a centerfire barrel beneath. Some have three barrels (called "drillings"), four barrels (called "vierlings"), or even five barrels (called "funflings"). They were most popular in the northeast USA, in previous centuries when black powder was still in common use.Įxcessive variants exist, both new and old, mostly of German manufacture. Side-by-side variants exist, but are fairly rare.
The two most common configurations are a rimfire rifle barrel on top with a shotgun barrel beneath, or a shotgun barrel on top with a high-powered centerfire rifle barrel beneath. The vast majority of combination guns, both new and old, are of the two-barreled over/under variety, and are simply called "combination guns" or "combinations". They almost always comprise a rifle caliber and a smoothbore shotgun caliber, but rare and oddball examples exist in multiple rifle or multiple shotgun calibers. Most are of a break action design, like a double-barreled shotgun. A combination gun is a firearm with two or more barrels of different calibers.