People owned cannon.
People owned war ships.
Great article. Thanks for posting.
Seems like an excellent argument.
At the time of the constitution, civilian Americans had rifles and the enemy and our own military had muskets. Clearly the 2nd Amendment never intended that the civil population should be armed with weapons inferior to the military.
Paper cartridge breech-loading rifles were also used in small numbers by both the British and the Americans during the revolutionary war.
This is so emphatically wrong.
Taylor Day needs to go back to school. Urgently. Desperately.
Scarcely anything in this article of his is accurate - not in detail, not in concept, nor interpretation.
Colonials roughly matched the numbers of Loyalists at the Battle of King’s Mountain in October 1780, thanks to last-minute reinforcement by pioneering “overmountain men” from the back country of Virginia and the Carolinas west. Patrick Ferguson was the only Britisher present. Records concerning the use of his breechloader in action are sparse; military historians and antique ordnance buffs tested a replica in the 1990s, and found it fouled much more quickly than anyone could have guessed, so it could not have done much to author any hoped-for British victory.
The American War of Independence (AWI, as most military historians term it today) did mark the first use of rifles in organized units, by a Euro-style military organization. But there were too few of these to make significant contributions.
Riflemen could not go toe to toe with an opposing force armed with the typical muskets of 1770: they took too long to load (as at least one other poster noted). Equally important: they did not mount bayonets. The socket bayonet was a key weapon of armed forces then, inflicting major shares of the casualties. Any riflemen (or musketeers without bayonets) would succumb to a charge by troops mounting bayonets. Indeed, senior American leadership knew this; George Washington himself went on record about his doubts concerning riflemen. Too skittish, too prone to scampering off the field. Though they could score telling hits at amazingly long ranges, in practice they often had to be protected by detachments of light infantry armed with standard muskets.
Washington wanted “an army who would look the enemy in the face.” American troops were notorious for running away from any British advance mounting bayonets, and it wasn’t lack of courage. Americans (ill supplied the whole time) frequently ran out of ammunition, and without bayonets, they had little in their hands with which to continue to resist. That began to be corrected when the French began supplying used muskets - through dummy corporations at first (by the Battles near Saratoga in early autumn 1777, French muskets were the preferred long arm in the ranks). Training was needed too, supplied at Valley Forge by Friedrich Wilhelm August Heinrich Ferdinand Steuben, who had been a captain on the staff of the Prussian Army. It worked; at the Battle of Monmouth in June 1778, many British personnel were shocked at the new tenacity and aggressiveness displayed by Continental units.
The blunderbuss was a close-combat arm, more enamored by naval boarding parties. A smoothbore musket would outrange it and (moreover) would be equipped with a bayonet.
James Puckle’s “Defence” gun dates to 1718 but was more of a military curiosity than a usable arm. Only a few were ever made and no record exists of them ever being used in action anywhere, though two were apparently purchased in the 1720s to equip an expedition against Caribbean islands. They appeared on a shipping manifest but no information exists as to whether they made it there.
A good part of Taylor’s paragraph on hand mortars seems incomprehensible.
Hand mortars did exist but - like breechloaders and blunderbusses - played very minor roles. They were more specialized than the impoverished, ill-equipped Americans could bother with. Several in the admittedly lovely illustration belong to the class of “fortification weapons,” which included wall guns, rampart guns, and Puckle’s gun. Most looked a lot like the more-common small arms but were bigger, heavier, and of larger bore. All played minor roles in AWI; there were almost no forts to defend or attack, in the fledgling United States. When American forces could get ahold of artillery, they preferred heavier stuff, like the guns dragged from Ticonderoga to Dorchester heights outside Boston, in early 1776. Two champagne-glass mortars accompanied Aerican forces overland all the way to Quebec in 1775, then all the way back to Ticonderoga, without being fired. When they were test fired, both cracked apart.
Why anyone included a photo of a pepper box is a mystery; they postdate 1807 and the invention of percussion ignition. Taylor did note that revolvers did exist in the 1770s, but they were more curiosities than practical arms, or vanity pieces crafted by master smiths, to showcase their gunmaking talents: complex, costly, fragile, and they might chain-fire. Poor equipage for the battlefield. Single-shot long guns dominated battlefields just about everywhere until the 1880s, surviving both the transition to percussion caps and to metallic cartridges.