"Digweed is British, the end" but he shoots an Italian Perazzi.
The presenter uses the word "hunting" when it is actually shooting. British guns are probably best for "shooting" where the process is static. "Guns" (not hunters) are placed at pegs (another term indicative of the static nature of shooting). When moving from drive to drive guns are cosseted in slips and after the season they need a maker's once over.
Du Broff in an old Gun Digest article on the British shooting scene wrote that if there is any desire in a Briton to actively seek game by moving over land, this desire is quickly stamped out. In other words there is no true hunting in Britain, and is no wonder that the term hunting, when used over there refers to mounted fox hunting. For more on the difference between hunting and how it morphed into shooting see here:
http://oplognosia.com/?p=12552Subjected to true hunting conditions these so called "best guns" will not last long. Try if you dare to drag a "best" over chukar terrain and see how well it lasts.
As for artistic merit, the assumption is that the British makers produced the most aesthetically pleasing guns. True if your aesthetic sense tends to Art Nouveau, a period that coincided with the development of the British gun used for static shooting.
There are other artistic trends. Arte Deco arguably produced a more modern and artistically more honest approach since it applied the "form follows function" principle in earnest. For more on this see here:
http://oplognosia.com/?p=9471Setting the criteria and then delivering judgement is a well known debating trick used by the video presenter. Asserting that British wing shooting is the best in the world is that criterion, and naturally a British gun is best for that activity. But British wing shooting is not hunting. There is no British hunting over public land, in other words none for the common folk.
And that brings us to what we want be seen as and who we want to identified with. I am OK with the image of the farm kid dragging a Stevens 620, or a Winchester single shot while kicking rabbits out of a bush and carrying whatever I harvest by myself home to cook, rather than the lord who downs hundreds of birds in one day's shooting, touches none of them since there are pickers up for that mundane task, and certainly never cooks anything he shoots. The thought of being identified with such barbarity makes me cringe.
