Tag: gun regulation

Send Lawyers, Guns and Money

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of the Revolution, the army relied on soldiers to bring weapons from home, including hunting guns, militia arms and outdated martial weapons from the French and Indian War.”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

Demystifying The AR-15 - (sharpshooteracademy.com)

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We Debate the Second Amendment and Guns

By Todd Lassa

Tighter gun regulation was on President Biden’s agenda even before two mass shootings — which occurred less than a week apart -- fueled familiar rhetoric from both sides of the argument. But “gun control,” a term The New York Times editorial columnist Frank Bruni suggests should be abolished from advocates’ vocabulary, is not at the top of Biden’s priorities. The president indicated in his first press conference, March 25, that he would have to take a pragmatic approach to his agenda while dealing with a Democratic majority in the Senate so slim that his party can’t afford to lose one of its members, let alone subject bills such as the two passed in the House (one on strengthening gun licensing, the other background checks) to filibuster. 

Following the March 16 deaths of eight people at Atlanta-area massage parlors, and the March 22 deaths of 10 people at a Boulder, Colorado, supermarket, pro-regulation Democrats and Second Amendment absolutist Republicans in the Senate took to familiar arguments. 

Politicians need to “offer more than thoughts and prayers” for survivors of the mass shootings, said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL; To which Sen. Ted Cruz, R-TX, responded that he will not apologize for “thoughts and prayers.” 

Standard arguments come down to a pro-gun regulation side that says that better licensing and background checks could stem fatalities in what is the most heavily armed first-world country in the world, while pro-Second Amendment advocates say the problem is lack of enforcement of existing laws, and that mental health issues, and not firearms, must be better-regulated. The “slippery slope” argument that a bit of gun regulation will eventually lead to full-on bans underlies Second Amendment absolutists’ point-of-view.

While gun regulation advocates point to the “outdated” wording that the Second Amendment allows firearms for a “well regulated militia,” the other side argues that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia settled the matter in writing the majority opinion in the District of Columbia vs. Heller, in which a Washington police officer challenged a District law that would have prohibited him from keeping a gun in his own home.

The amendment’s wording “in no way connotes participation in a structured military organization,” Scalia wrote for the 5-4 majority in the 2008 ruling. 

The National Rifle Association, which usually responds to events like those in Atlanta and Boulder with a full-throated support of gun ownership,  reacted to the uproar over the latest mass shootings only by repeating, on its official Twitter account, that “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, should not be infringed.”

This time, another favorite NRA argument, that “a good guy with a gun” is the best way to solve the problem of “a bad guy with a gun” was not raised. Among the 10 victims in the Boulder supermarket shooting was Officer Eric Talley.

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