By Stephen Macaulay
According to the American Revolution Institute of the Society of the Cincinnati, “At the beginning of the Revolution, the army relied on soldiers to bring weapons from home, including hunting guns, militia arms and outdated martial weapons from the French and Indian War.”
Pop Quiz: What Was the French and Indian War?*
One of the weapons that was widely used in the Revolutionary War was the Long Land Pattern Musket, a.k.a., “Brown Bess.”
According an article on the smoothbore muzzleloader in the Revolutionary War Journal, the weapon was three feet, eight inches long and weighed approximately 14 pounds. Not the sort of thing that could readily be concealed, were one so inclined.
Apparently the gun wasn’t particularly accurate. The author of the Revolutionary War Journal story, Harry Schenawolf, writes, “Major George Hanger, an authority at the time, declared that when ‘firing at a man beyond a hundred and fifty yards one might as well fire at the moon.’”
Pop Quiz: How Far, in Yards, is the Moon from the Earth?**
Schenawolf goes on to write about the Brown Bess in action, which is worth quoting at length:
“Fast, not accurate firing was required of the British soldier standing in long ranks while facing the enemy at a hundred yards over an open field. The average soldier was expected to release three volleys per minute; four was exceptional. After the first volley, troops usually took from twenty to thirty seconds to reload. Upon loosing the second volley, they would reload and the third volley would occur a minute after the first. Defending troops were expected to release two volleys in the twenty-some seconds it would take their enemy to cover a hundred yards at a dead run. The second volley would hopefully be fired at less than thirty yards.”
So it was the Brown Bess that was the firearm of choice when these words were written in the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
There are those who argue what is called the “individual right theory,” which has it that because of the phrase “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,” the State can’t unduly interfere with one’s gun ownership.
There are those who argue what is called the “collective rights theory,” which has it that personal weaponry is primarily for purposes of a “well regulated Militia.”
Pop Quiz: What Is Wrong with the Phrase at the End of the Preceding Paragraph?***
I would like to propose the “Brown Bess theory,” which has it that the Framers had no idea, clever though they may have been, probably couldn’t have imagined something like an AR-15, which is apparently not accurate (but probably better than the Brown Bess), but which, according to the site Sharpshooter Academy can fire “as fast as someone can pull the trigger (anywhere between 45-60 rounds per minute). If a Brown Bess could fire three rounds per minute, then it would take 20 minutes to get off 60 rounds (although the barrel of the musket would have been exceedingly hot, so that wouldn’t like happen).
So if we’re going to interpret the Constitution in a way that goes back to what the Framers knew, then let’s put it in the context of the Brown Bess.
This is not about taking people’s guns away. It is about looking at the availability of what are arguably weapons of mass destruction that are too readily at hand for hands that they don’t belong in.
*No, it wasn’t the French fighting Indians. It was the French fighting the British—about the upper Ohio River Valley—with the Indians fighting along with the French (and some with the Brits). It began in 1754 and ended in 1763 in favor of the Brits, and given costs borne by the colonists, this was a factor that led to the American Revolution. People who harken to the rights they find in the Second Amendment should be required to know from whence it came.
**No one who doesn’t work at NASA ought to know the answer to this one—420,464,000—but given the absurdity of what passes for knowledge in some parts of Congress, the silliness of this is at least benign, not potentially deadly.
*** “well regulated” form a compound adjective, so there should be a hyphen between the two words, which I point out because there tends to be a lot of questioning about the commas in that sentence. Clearly the Framers weren’t necessarily masters of grammar.
A Revolution in Arms: Weapons in the War for Independence - The American Revolution Institute
Loading and Firing a Brown Bess Musket in the Eighteenth Century – Revolutionary War Journal