Of course the muzzle is probably the least important part when you're considering wall thickness, but for whatever reason, nearly all French guns seem to have a lot of meat up at the muzzle end--and I think in the barrels in general--in comparison to Brit guns. Yet a lot of them are also quite light. And the good thing about meat in the muzzle on French guns is that many of them have pretty tight chokes; thus, there's plenty of steel you can remove if you wish to open them up some.