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mgburg · #44 06-09-2009, 02:10 AM

LaRondo...I'm willing to believe some of the Wiki-wordage, but in general, if you are/were looking at raw numbers...what were those numbers being compared against? Landowners having guns? Everyone having a chance to have a gun?

Obviously, if only 5,000 guns were in the colonies and the total population was 1,000,000...then the ratio of ownership (assuming one gun/person counted) would be alot lower than a few years later (Civil War), where the need for everyone to arm themselves to FIGHT A WAR IN THEIR OWN BACKYARD would have a tendency to skew the numbers a bit higher...

Colonial times...we were either TRAPPING our food or growing it...I'll grant you that much...

But, when the British started controlling imports and taxing the living p*ss out of the colonists...someone needed something a little more substantial than slingshots to stand up to the British and their muskets...and since the British were blockading any imports, I'm sure that anyone that had any knowledge of weaponery was ALSO under the watchful eye of the Redcoats...but somehow, a few someones managed to obtain just enough arms in order to overthrow the British...and that was the point...being able to control one's own destiny against tyranny...and then, again, in 1812 and finally, again, in 1861...I guess the old adage "The third time is the charm" certainly opened Pandora's Box on the rifle/pistol front in the United States...

Point being? It looks like a few books got sold on the false basis that the United States "SUDDENLY" armed itself during/following the Civil War...

The real point that appears to have been overlooked or ignored? We always had arms...otherwise it would not have been written in the Constitution...it was thought of highly enough that the Forefathers thought it was important enough to be sure that NO GOVERNMENT would be able to take the weapons away...regardless the weapon being one pistol or an arsenal of rifles...

Let's ask a simple question here. When everything is working the way it should and all is well with the world...do we ***** and complain about how GOOD EVERYTHING IS?

Nope...only when we need to vent...so that's when someone writes about the tornado, the bad weather, the gun that didn't fire (due to poor maintenance or whatever...) or other issues...we didn't write up orders for non-rusting rifles or operating pistols...we wrote down that people didn't know a firing pin from a dead pig's ear...people *****ed and wrote down their frustrations...nobody wrote about how good they had it, or how well the troops trained or how everyone managed to take out the "...whites of their eyes..." when it counted...they wrote about "...poor Johnny Smythe got his head blown off by a Redcoat 'cause his powder was too damp and his musket hammer was too lose to properly strike the pan..."

Who knows how many rifles/pistols the colonists had among themselves? The obvious answer is that they managed to have just enough to p*ss off the British and beat them at their own game...

And, we today, are what we are, due to our forefathers being able to be what they needed to be, when they had to.

Properly armed and able to defend their homes against ANY invading army or force...