Replies

The Bible says that the young shepherd boy, David, killed the giant warrior, Goliath, with stones and a sling shot.

This is a common mistake. The Bible says he slew Goliath with a "sling", not a "sling shot". The two are different.

A Sling:

Sling

A Sling-Shot:

Sing-Shot

In the right (trained) hands, a staff sling can crack a human skull at over 100M - and it was a common hand weapon back in the day. Using much larger projectiles than a hand sling, these weapons would wreck havoc on a battlefield.

From:
http://www.lloydianaspects.co.uk/weapons/staffsling.html
(cool and eccentric Brit website warning)

(on the staff sling)
I took the Metro down to Tynemouth for my first experiments. From there, I slung stones out to sea. There were plenty of stones to pick from. I quickly discovered that I could with ease sling very large stones in comparison with the ones I used with my little hand sling.

I was picking stones the size of apples, perhaps a bit larger than a tennis ball, or the size of a smallish orange. Since all my shots went out to sea, I cannot tell you what range I was getting with my shots, but I doubt I was getting much further than 120 yards.

Some shots might have been as little as eighty yards, but I really could be very wrong with my estimates. One thing that made me doubt my guesses was when I decided to go for accuracy rather than range, and targeted a man-sized rock that was 50-80 yards away from me.

My first shot hit it plumb in the centre, bounced, flew back the way it had come, went directly over my head (missing me by several feet but I ducked anyway), and landed twenty yards behind me. Either some very strange physics was at work, or my estimates of distance were very poor.

There are a couple of moovies to go along with the narrative.