"The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."
- Thomas Jefferson (quoting 18th century criminologist Cesare Beccaria)
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9 comments:
Stated in a day where only single shot muskets were available.Getting more than 3 shots off a minute was a record.Jefferson was right in principle,but the ability to rap off hundreds of shots per minute has invited temtation.Many mass murderers would not have nor could have carried out their attacks with weapons of his day.
1:38. The point is, the "assailants" don't care about the law. Banning ANY firearm is not going to protect children, make us safer, etc. Criminals will find a way to inflict damage through any means necessary.
You would be surprised what a skilled firearm operator can do with a single shot rifle or pistol.
They need to prosecute the laws already on the books, before adding to it. Their idea of a "AWB" is just to impose more taxes and fees. It's not to protect life.
1:38
Please tell of all the Bills you have seen being introduced which one would have prevented the killing at Sandy Hook.
1:38 Washington DC has a gun ban and yet in the last day or two, 13 people were shot in a drive by shooting. How's that ban working for them?
GO TOMMY J!! 1:38 How dumb is your post, how about a BOMB, I guess they didn't have them back in the day?
A lot of you are stuck on the idea that the only weapons available at the time were single shot muskets.
Firearms were constantly being upgraded, improved and experimented with.
They had repeating carbines, multi-barrel rifles and pistols, flint-lock and percussion, cannons, pistols with knives and swords built into them, and various other types of weapons.
It wouldn't be until 1885 that semi-auto firearms were developed.
Many of you do not give the founding fathers enough credit for envisioning the future.
These were highly intelligent men. Perhaps less worldly than we are now, but I would trust their intelligence and common sense much more than most of the leaders we have today.
You think the people involved in such a brutal and deadly war would not consider better weapons?
Whatever the military and police have, civilians should also possess. IF, that is, they still want to be free.
Even throughout the Civil War the loading and firing of a weapon was time consuming.Weapon performance does factor into this whether we like it or not.Mass shootings would have required either a mass number of shooters or a bomb as an earlier post suggested.Interesting about the 1885 advent of the semi auto rifle.From that point forward a one person mass shooting was indeed possible.Jefferson may have been born 100 years too early.
Its ironic that the people most interested in restricting and taking our weapons have insured that THEY are protected by a small army of men with the LATEST in weaponry. Because they are too important to lose. That might be true, but "disappearing" shouldn't be dismissed too quickly...
7:58 PM
The best units could get off 5 shots a minute. Not too shabby considering all the steps necessary to fire a musket.
Others would use multiple rifles and pistols to get off more shots than a single one.
Still another strategy was to have groups of 3 fire in rotation. When one group was firing the other was loading and vice versa.
They used mass firing from a lot of people as opposed to a few shots from a few people.
Their range was not all that good and certainly no match for today's weapons in terms of accuracy and rate of fire.
They used what they had available to them at the time, thanks to importing them from France, and thankfully, did very well with them.
The ones the colonists used had a much better range than what the British had. We had over a hundred yard advantage.
Before the British attacked, they also tried to confiscate firearms.
Sound familiar?
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