The thing with these early guns is that they literally have no trigger mechanism - you have to straight up take a lit match and hold it to a little hole at the top of the barrel (that's what the black dot on the barrel in this picture is). So the barrel, by necessity, has to be pretty far from your face, so you can extend your hand to light the powder. This one at least has a stock, some of them are just a barrel on a stick, and you have to either hold them underarm or rest them on top of your shoulder, like some kind of medieval bazooka