 FACT: Benjamin Martin shoots a British soldier who is on a moving  horse using a flintlock pistol at a range of approximately 100  yards. A ball from a black powder pistol would not even reach that  sort of distance and hitting a moving target at that distance would  be difficult even with a modern pistol. The effective range of a  blackpowder pistol is about 20 feet as the barrel is too short to  allow all the powder to burn before the ball leaves the barrel (too  low a muzzle velocity to achieve any sort of range)