One of the things I most adore about the 18th century is the eye for beauty.
This is my favorite lock from the ones we've been using recently—it belongs to a fowling piece and on the outside it's pretty simple apart from that little piece of ornamentation at the featherspring.
But on the inside it has this beautifully sculpted bridle, which gets me just because... no one is seeing that. That side is flush inside the stock whenever the gun is assembled. The only person able to appreciate that ornamentation is the person taking it apart to clean and maintain it.
I'm not sure where I was going with this but I feel like there's something deeply... intimate? about that? The idea that someone took the time to sculpt an ornamented piece for a mechanism that isn't even visible most of the time, the idea that really only one person gets to appreciate it and only by taking the time to care for it, the fact that the only way by which to see it is to make the gun useless—to remove its capacity for violence.
Anyway. Not to wax poetic about flintlocks. But you know how it is.
