|
"Scattergun" has been slang for shotgun for well over a century and probably was before modern shotguns.
Muskets are not rifled. They all work with shot, ball, "buck and ball" and to a lesser extent, anything you dump down the barrel. And it was quite common for people to use anything available if they didn't have proper shot or ball. All the old muzzle loading smoothbores are essentially the same in this regard, be they muskets or fowling pieces. Big (large caliber) smooth bores are short range effective with shot, even if the shot is a handful of gravel. Not as good as real shot, but better than nothing.
The "blunderbuss" had a flared bell shaped muzzle, which people believed spread the shot (but really doesn't do much along those lines), it was often a "coach gun". The one real benefit to the bell muzzle was to aid speeding reloading because it acted like a funnel.
Scattergun is appropriate for any arm firing multiple shot instead of a single projectile. For the past century plus, that's been commonly understood to be a shotgun.
__________________
All else being equal (and it almost never is) bigger bullets tend to work better.
|