Dan wrote on Jul 26
th, 2012 at 1:42pm:
I met a guy down south named J.D. who was a real country boy. He chewed tobaco the whole time my dad and I were there, he and his wife were very hospitable, and he works very hard. And since he worked hard and for a long time he had a very successful glass company and now has a very nice house and probably in the top 3 most extensive and nicest gun collections I've ever seen, probably number 1 in diversity. This includes beating actual guns stores I've been to.
Anyway, we were watching old westerns and talking about guns and reloading and such when he asked me what my hobbies were. I told him about my bow making and then went on to slinging and showed him the one I had in my pocket. A look of recognition dawned on his face when he told me his expierence with slings.
Slightly paraphrased, he said: "When I was a young'un my brother and I would take a real worn out pair of shoes and take off the shoe laces and one of the shoe toungs. Then we'd head down to the quarry and find some round rocks that would fit in the pouch, and we'd sort of [motions a simple helicopter style] and throw em'. We could never hit anything with em' but I remember being able to throw them a real long way, much farther than I could by hand."
Point being, if people had access to a Bible with the legendary story of David and Goliath (like in this case) or a people group near them that used slings (apaches, afghani shepeards, peruvian sheperds, etc) they probably would have known what they were.
The problem you woul have had is the same problem we have today. Slinging is very difficult, and it takes a lot of deterimnation that not everyone has or somple doesn't feels the need to keep progressing.
Since I was alive and interested in slinging before the internet I had more or less the same problem as J.D. Lack of info. We read enscyklpedias which told us of the pouch and strings, and to twirl it over our heads until we had enough speed and could let go.
So we ended up with slings with thin nylon cords as long as ourself with no knots or loops, and twirled as fast as we could, and sendt our ammo
everywhere. Fun for some time but really
useless.
I remember us spraying the nearby bushes with pouchfulls of gravel, which was the nearest any of us came to hitting anything