Muskets like those from 1776 are mostly exempt from today’s gun laws

A.J. Drake, a historic interpreter, aims his Brown Bess flintlock replica musket during a Revolutionary War event in Halifax, N.C., on April 10, 2026. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed) 2026-05-14T04:01:00Z Halifax, N.C. (AP) — With 165 grains of black powder in the barrel, a .75-caliber Brown Bess flintlock musket like the ones the redcoats carried in 1776 can hurl a lead ball at a velocity of around 1,000 feet (305 meters) per second. Imagine what that can do to a human body. Now, imagine that it’s almost completely exempt from gun regulations. How can that be? Well, under federal and most state laws, many antique or replica guns aren’t technically considered firearms. In most places, even convicted felons can own them. “I suspect the average judge would be surprised to find that out,” says Second Amendment scholar and gun-rights attorney Dave Hardy, himself the proud owner of two Civil War-era long guns. During a National Rifle Association event back in 2000, the late actor Charlton Heston famously hoisted a flintlock — the single-shot weapon that won the Revolution and was still in wide use a half century after Congress debated the Second Amendment — into the air and said the Democrats would have to take it “from my cold, dead hands.” He needn’t have worried. A blast from the past During debate over the Gun Control Act of 1968, Sen. John Goodwin Tower argued that flintlocks and many other antique or replica guns should be exempt from regulation. The Texas Republican said it was needed “to relieve an unnecessarily burdensome problem for serious collectors of antique firearms and for historians and museums.” Treating all weapons the same, he argued, would unfairly target collector items “which have little, if any, practical use as a firearm in the modern connotation.” The provision defines an antique as any weapon “with a matchlock, flintlock, percussion cap, or similar type of ignition system” manufactured “in or before 1898” — as long as it hasn’t been modified to fire modern ammunition. This generally means muzzleloaders that use black powder or a black powder substitute, though some early cartridge guns are included. You can even own and fire a cannon. (