Kyrie, you're wandering around in the wilderness.
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Larry,
I may well be in the wilderness, but you sir as so caught in a bubble confined to England that the rest of the world seems unknown to you. You are like the fellow who has only a hammer and sees nothing but nails.
By your logic the Spanish use of locks derived from the H&H lock makes the Spanish guns copies of English shotguns. By the same logic Beretta’s use of the locking and take down system of the Walther P.38 makes Berettas copies of German pistols . Further, since the Walther model PP uses a variation of the S&W passive hammer block to keep the hammer off the firing pin when the hammer is down, so by your logic Walthers are copies of American revolvers.
All modern firearms have adopted mechanical designs from earlier, successful, firearms, making them derivatives of those earlier guns – not copies.
The Spanish shotguns that are copies of English light game guns are those AyA guns intentionally produced for the English market (the No. 1, No, 2, and XXV), and what makes these guns copies of English light game guns is the weight restrictions within which they are made.
You wouldn’t have to ask why we see so few older Spanish shotguns compared to the relatively large number of older English, German, French, and Belgium guns, if you spent a little more time outside of your British bubble reading some recent history.
Germany, France, and Belgium have been periodically stripped of sporting firearms of all kinds by war, socialist governments, and US importers who served at the market of last resort. British shotgun owners were historically of that upper class that effectively no longer exists in England, having been crushed by war debt, poor economic policy, and increasingly socialist governments that have taxed the landed gentry largely out of existence. We have their shotguns here in the USA because the English have had to sell them to make tax payments.
None of this was true of Spain. Twentieth century Spain was never the battleground for a World War, was never invaded or conquered by a foreign power, and saw socialism rise only after the death of Franco. Spanish guns were never gathered up and sold in mass as was the case in Germany, France, and Belgium, and the Spanish were never forced to sell their fine, old guns to make tax payments.
