In nine cases out of ten it is the
fault of the sights, and they file them true."
"Then really every gun has been fired before being sold?"
"We turn out about sixteen hundred guns a day, and each one has been
fired several times."
"Shotguns, too?"
"The same standard of accuracy is needed in those. It is just as
important that a shotgun should throw a certain percentage of its shot
within a certain radius as it is that a rifle bullet should go straight.
Down in this little room," he continued, "a man stands all day shooting
down this gallery, forty yards range, and each target is brought back
and measured. In a circle with a fifteen-inch radius a boy counts the
numbers of holes made in the paper by the tiny shot. There should be
300. If there are 290 the gun is passed, but if less it is rejected.
Sometimes you get very queer shot patterns without knowing why."
"Do all shotguns throw as evenly as that?"
"All good ones should. It is astonishing to see how regularly the
'scatter' of a barrel will work out. Every barrel, of course, is stamped
with the number of shots it has put into the fifteen-inch circle."
"And you make cartridges, too, don't you?" Hamilton asked.
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