Well, not completely equal, but his invention of the revolver certainly made life better for flintlock pistol owners. Speed and accuracy were still a subjective issue.
Now, maybe even accuracy is going to be egalitarian.
When I was a young man at Duquesne, we had a rifle team. In the NCAA then, if you were going to have a popular Division I sport that offered scholarships (such as basketball) you had to offer multiple smaller (less popular) Division I sports also - with scholarships, though obviously not full ones.
So I joined the Rifle Team. We used Anschutz rifles, which are .22 caliber with aperture sighting, and we were basically shooting from three positions at a bullseye the size of a .22 bullet from 50 feet away. I did quite well, though the scholarship was only something like $250, which was okay, I had a regular scholarship anyway and that covered books and I got a letter and can say I had a scholarship in an Atlantic 10 Division I college sport. At the end of the season the NCAA produced a booklet with the national rankings and I was in it. The coach noted that for someone who had never shot competition, it was a terrific result, but that I didn't seem very excited.
"Who am I going to tell?" I said. "I am not even the fifth best shot in my family."
And that was true. A few years later my cousin would win a world championship at the 1,000 yard range.
Fast forward to 2013. A company called Tracking Point has made those 1,000 yard shots available to everyone - even a guy who is not even the fifth best shot in his immediate family. Heck, even an NBC reporter who didn't know how to shoot at all.
They created the world’s first Precision Guided Firearm. Now they are tackling doing the same thing at 3,000 yards.
Craig Harrison, a corporal in the British Army, set the record for the longest confirmed sniper kill in Afghanistan in November of 2009, using an L115A3 Long Range Rifle at a range of 2,707 yards.
Tracking Point says they are working on a "Super Gun" that can consistently hit a target at over 3,100 yards. Obviously a lot goes into long-distance shots. Having no wind, clear visibility and mild weather helps but range is the tricky one. For Harrison's shot, it took him and his spotter about 9 tries to zero in. But once they did, he consecutively took out a Taliban machine gunner, then the second one and finally the machine gun itself.
How will they do it? No idea, it is just an announcement and a sketch. And this isn't for a commercial rifle. It is like basic research, except for blowing up bad guys from 1.75 miles away and without firing up a helicopter. They say their new "Super Gun" would extend their existing Xact technology. So it would have to look something like this:
Credit and link: TrackingPoint Blog
It will be Linux-powered, and that makes open source snipers happy. Though take heart, snipers in the Apple camp, you can stream it to your spotter's iPhone too.
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