"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."Now, there's a ton of points that can be (and have been) made there, but this time, here's what I come back to:
Boston, Massachusetts, 1770 - Twelve trained military personnel fired into a crowd at pointblank range with military-issue firearms (I assume Long Land Pattern Brown Bess muskets).
They killed five people.
And remember, the British had just declared victory in the Seven Years War less than a decade earlier. They were, at that time, the top dogs in the world militarily speaking. Yet a dozen of their troopers, firing in a target-rich environment, with military training and military grade weapons, had a kill ratio of 5 kills to 12 shots.
And that was considered a massacre.
It was still some years later before the British got a breech loading rifle (the Ferguson Rifle) onto the battlefield, and even then it was so ungodly expensive and complicated, only 200 were manufactured. On the American side of the impending War for Independence, the coveted weapon was the Pennsylvania Long Rifle, and calling it 'the weapon' is somewhat misleading - they were handmade, not standardized, so one didn't simply need to have experience with a gun to use one properly, they had to have experience with that gun, spending countless hours training to account for its specific balance, weight, etc. American sharpshooters equipped with the Long Rifles might have even had to make their own ammunition, since the hand-fashioned barrels wouldn't have been consistently sized.
We acknowledge that weapons have improved in efficacy over time, and many of us argue that they now out perform what the signers of the Constitution anticipated, calling the validity of the second amendment into question. However, we don't really talk about what has *fundamentally* changed with respect to individually owned weapons.
Remember the wording: "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."
The second amendment doesn't talk about having guns for personal defense, hunting, or entertainment. The possession of firearms was a civic responsibility, because, all technical details aside, 18th century guns were democratic weapons.
Infantrymen were drilled to line up, stand their ground, and load their weapons with mechanical precision and reliability, performing their duty no matter what happened, and there's a reason why infantry was fielded in massive regiments, and trained to fight like a single, large machine.
The reality is that warfare necessitates large-scale carnage, and without the occasional good fortune of advantageous terrain, the only way to accomplish that with 18th century firearms was to have a very large number of them. In other words, the United States could only exist if it could put a number of muskets and rifles on the battlefield comparable to what the British professional army could field. In that context, putting guns on the field was less a demonstration of firepower, and more a demonstration of dedication and conviction.
When you consider the population of colonial era America (Boston had about 20,000 people, about 10% of which were slaves who weren't allowed to have guns), it was important that you get everyone out there to fight (except the women, because I guess however afraid we were of losing to the British, we were more afraid of arming American women).
That's changed.
Besides not having a foreign empire occupying our streets, the balance of power conferred by modern weapons is very different from what it once was; guns are no longer force equalizers.
With a 42% kill ratio under ideal circumstances, and a rate of fire of about four rounds per minute in the hands of a highly disciplined, experienced, and gifted soldier, the only way to accomplish a 'massacre' by today's standards would be to either amass a large number of people to fire with you, or to ask everyone to stand still for a long bit while you go about it. And morbid though it may be, yes, to impress upon you the difference between now and then, I am going to make the comparison.
If the Boston Massacre is a gauge for effectiveness, to kill 59 Americans as the Las Vegas shooter did, British regulars would have to fire about 142 shots.
For the twelve regulars in front of the state house in Boston, that would probably take about four minutes of sustained fire - and again, that's at point-blank range, with people standing still - if the mob charged at their attackers, the regulars would have to fix bayonets (which in many cases precluded a musket from being reloaded) or be prepared to fight hand-to-hand.
For a single eighteenth century man, acting entirely alone as 21st century mass-shooters generally do, it would take between 35min and 45min to fire what would have amounted to about five pounds of ammunition (not including powder and wadding). The amount of smoke that would create would probably cause his accuracy to decline pretty quickly, too.
Clearly, that's unrealistic; in the 18th century you simply couldn't terrorize people as a lone gunman firing 3-4 rounds a minute - after your first shot, somebody would probably beat you to death with a candlestick, a lead pipe, or something else readily available to anyone - a crowd of people wouldn't need guns to defend themselves against a gunman whose shots are 15-20 seconds apart with a maximum effective range of 75 yards, and marked by a bright flash and a huge plume of smoke.
Now, consider the Declaration of Independence's (probably) most memorable phrase:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..."We take that premise to be the driving spirit of our nation's founding, and although we didn't live up to it at the time, and haven't wholly committed to it in the present, it still underlies most of our principles.
We revolted against the British Empire and formed our own country on the premise that it was wrong for a small number of people to be granted so much power by the system that they could control the fates of a large number of people who had no say in granting them that power. We established a form of democracy, because while we knew that some people would have to make decisions, we realized it would be highly preferable if the people could decide who would be making those decisions for them.
Within the context of the country we created, guns were not a terrible threat to democracy; if you could actually amass a large enough number of followers to seize power over your neighbors by force, you could more easily amass a large enough number of followers to vote you into office.
But at a certain point that changed, a change which is embodied in the history and fiction of the Old West, a genre which is defined by small numbers of highly skilled men dictating the fates of American citizens by the power of advanced weapons, like revolvers and repeating rifles. In the Old West genre, power is not democratic; whether hero or villain, power rests in the hands of the few individuals who have the best gun and the greatest skill with it - it's a kill-or-be-killed meritocracy that rewards specialization and ruthlessness.
And the trajectory of weapons development hasn't changed. Firearms have gotten faster, lighter, more accurate, and as they have, the problem they pose has likewise become more severe. Although guns are widely available to those seeking to 'protect themselves', a gun is a poor defense against another gun; by the time an armed citizen can respond to an attack, many are likely already dead - when the 'score' is counted in bodies, the lone gunman is essentially unbeatable at his game, even when vastly outnumbered - simply because he fired first, and likely with a weapon that can do more damage in fifteen seconds than a squad of 18th century redcoats.
Contrary to the romantic notions of gun collectors and Constitutionalists, modern firearms are not the weapons that the founding fathers sought to protect. Privately owned gun collections do not preserve democracy, because they are not weapons of democracy, they are weapons that empower a single abhorrent individual to decide the fate of dozens of others. They do not grant power to each man equally, they simply grant power to the man who knows the least restraint, the least compassion - they grant power to the man who shoots first.
Modern firearms are not weapons of democracy, they are weapons of tyranny.
And we haven't stopped making better guns.
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