Not Greenland, but I knew most of the kids from Stratham who went to Exeter High.
That area is still surprisingly undeveloped considering how close it is to Portsmouth. Little ponds elsewhere have more densely packed cottages around them than Great Bay does. Southern Maine is still mostly one town deep along the coast, then wilderness inland.
-jsw
Not Greenland, but I knew most of the kids from Stratham who went to Exeter High.
That area is still surprisingly undeveloped considering how close it is to Portsmouth. Little ponds elsewhere have more densely packed cottages around them than Great Bay does. Southern Maine is still mostly one town deep along the coast, then wilderness inland.
-jsw
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[Ed]When I was a kid, my relatives were still sawing ice from the pond at Bayside (Greenland, on the water) to stock up the ice house for summer. The family house there was built in 1741. The Weeks House, in town, dates to
1711, I think. It's now the library.
Alas, it is a quandary. Less gun crime, maybe, but not less crime. Now Britain wants to control knives, and when there will still be crime, probably pointed sticks and rocks. Of course, the criminals will still have guns. Too bad that the only option for small weak people to defend themselves from criminals is...guns.
I'll stick with the freedom we have.
David
The slaughter of the American Civil War was not because of muskets but rather the use of tactics developed for muskets when the weapons employed were much more accurate rifles. A musket volley at a certain range caused far fewer casualties than rifles at the same range and eventually they ended up with trench warfare instead of lines of soldiers standing up to be targets.
David
Alas, it is a quandary. Less gun crime, maybe, but not less crime. Now Britain wants to control knives, and when there will still be crime, probably pointed sticks and rocks. Of course, the criminals will still have guns. Too bad that the only option for small weak people to defend themselves from criminals is...guns.
I'll stick with the freedom we have.
David
============================================================== [Ed]
I've spent two many years discussing this to have any energy left for it. I don't think the fight is over yet in the US. It will remain a real conflict issue in the cultural divide, and I expect it to get a lot hotter in coming years.
The slaughter of the American Civil War was not because of muskets but rather the use of tactics developed for muskets when the weapons employed were much more accurate rifles. A musket volley at a certain range caused far fewer casualties than rifles at the same range and eventually they ended up with trench warfare instead of lines of soldiers standing up to be targets.
David
================================================================ [Ed]
Right. The Minie ball did more to revolutionize warfare than many people credit it. When I was a kid in Hagerstown, MD, we'd follow the tractors in the nearby fields when they plowed in the spring. We'd each come up with two or three of them, every year.
I lived on Little Antietam Creek. 'Lots of shooting there.
The problem with Miller is that SCOTUS never heard anything from Miller's defense. There was no one to point out, for instance, that short barreled shotguns were martial arms and had been used in trench warfare in WWI.
It's hard to win a case when the lawyers can't find their client and can't afford to go to D.C. on their own.
This is totally consistent with an agenda of defending the status quo at the expense of citizen's rights. It's always been easier to control unarmed peasants.
David
Since they seem to invade the wrong address fairly often, yes. OTOH, it the wrong address occurrences are only 5% of the paramilitary police home invasions, there are a LOT we don't hear about.
No worries, ED, they'll come to you.
David
Strange, you know. My family has lived in New Hampshire for generations and listening to my grandfather's tales it seems that his grandfather and his father and he all had guns in the house. Certainly my father and myself had guns in the house. I remember buying a gun when I was 14 years old. Paid the money and carried the rifle out the door. And in that 5 generations not a one of us ever committed any "gun crimes"... well, other than shooting deer out of season, anyway :-)
By the way, the numbers of people murdered(very few)that I remember were all thought to have been done by people with names like "Smith" and "Jones" not by people with funny names like "Dombrowski" and "LaBlanc".
But one thing that was different. there wasn't any free rides back in those days. You either worked or you didn't eat. I wonder whether that had anything to do with it?
But that isn't the point, is it Ed. The fact is that there have been innumerable "gun crimes" in New York since the Sullivan Law was passed, so effectively the law hasn't worked.
But effectively they do not work. Which, when the guy with the gun holds up the bank, steals your money and shoots a couple of people is the determining fact.
I hate to beat a dead horse, but possession of a firearm is essentially illegal in Thailand yet we have a large number of shootings every year. Ownership of explosives in Indonesia is essentially illegal but they blew up those bars in Bali.
There are laws banning off track gambling and prostitution (except in Nevada :-) and of course that doesn't exist in the U.S., either.
But I've also read that back in the day they actually banned alcoholic beverages in the whole country and probably drinking stopped immediately!
No Ed, passing laws doesn't really control much of anything. It just furnishes a way of punishing those who do something that you don't want them to.
The Ferguson was considered a useless device by most military thinkers and I believe that the only unit armed with them was Ferguson's own unit and I believe that was at Ferguson's expense and they were used in a single battle in the revolutionary war (I think the Brits lost that one) and never used again.
Well, it's a political topic... although I don't normally go around quoting Chairman Mao...
"All political power flows from the barrel of a gun".
No gun, no power?
The problem with Miller is that SCOTUS never heard anything from Miller's defense. There was no one to point out, for instance, that short barreled shotguns were martial arms and had been used in trench warfare in WWI.
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It didn't matter that there was no defense. This is an old red herring. The Supreme Court does not try the facts of a case and the oral arguments in most cases are nothing but window dressing; the briefs and the clerks' research are the substance of what the Court considers. In this case, the Court was trying the constitutionality of the law. That's the usual case, in fact.
There is little question that the justices' clerks knew perfectly well what guns were used in trench warfare. This was not really a case about which guns are used for what. It was a case about whether Congress had the authority to pass the NFA. The shotgun was just a convenient device to justify the existence of the case.
Also, the government didn't claim it wasn't a military firearm. It said that there were no *militias* that used sawed-off double-barrel shotguns. And that's what the Court said, too. If that had been a factual problem, it wouldn't have changed the case. It just would have broadened it somewhat.
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It's hard to win a case when the lawyers can't find their client and can't afford to go to D.C. on their own.
========================================================= [Ed]
Well, Miller was dead -- before the Court tried the case, IIRC.
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This is totally consistent with an agenda of defending the status quo at the expense of citizen's rights. It's always been easier to control unarmed peasants.
David
=========================================================== [Ed]
I don't follow why you would say that. As the Court said, no right is absolute. The state had an interest in making it harder for mobsters to commit crimes, so they limited access to the particular type of guns that criminals were using. It didn't limit the guns used lawfully by citizens.
The question of whether that would be effective is not involved here. The question is whether Congress had the authority to make that limitation to the 2nd Amendment.
We should abandon the legal system and nullify all laws then, because having a justice system only "creates" criminals...
snipped-for-privacy@invalid.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
And Ed, and those who think like him, will never accept that notion -- because they don't recognize a difference in the meanings of the words "prohibit" and "prevent".
snipped-for-privacy@invalid.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
And Ed, and those who think like him, will never accept that notion -- because they don't recognize a difference in the meanings of the words "prohibit" and "prevent".
======================================================================= [Ed]
Supposing what I don't "recognize" is somewhat presumptuous, but I'll let that slide. What I'm saying is that there is a self-inflicted blind spot, or possibly a feeble attempt at demagoguery, in saying the Sullivan Law "doesn't work." Of course it works. It's worked fantastically. What DOESN'T work is a hodgepodge of state and local laws that defeat every attempt to reduce the incidence of gun crimes.
It's as if you were in a boat and started drilling holes in the bottom. As it sinks, you say "lousy boat. It doesn't float."
The issue is dripping with irony. The 2nd Amendment is a federal issue. Gun rights, with enthusiasm by many, are embraced as a federal issue over states' rights issue. There was cheering for the McDonald decision, which trumped Illinois and Chicago law with federal law.
Yet, when the consequences of lax laws in one state adjoining another state are plain and obvious, suddenly the gun-rightists act as if it doesn't matter -- it's the Sullivan Law itself that's deficient.
This is a huge issue and, as I said, I'm out of energy for it. But the issue here is just too brain-dead not to comment.
Ah... A musket volley at a certain range... usually 50 yards, or less, in the conventional infantry tactics of the time, will do just about the same amount of damage as a volley of rifled muskets (to be specific) at the same range.
The difference is that a volley of rifled musket fire at 100 yards will do about the same amount of damage as the 50 yard volley of smooth bore musket fire thus while you are advancing across the field to get to the 50 yard point they get to shoot about two or three effective volleys at you.
Yes,
Ferguson was killed, if I remember correctly, and his unit (Battalion? Regiment?) was disarmed and re-issued standard muskets, and as you say, the remaining breach loaders seemed to disappeared.
There is only so much time and energy that I will put into this "discussion," but I did NOT say anything of the sort. What I said (and you failed to grasp) is that the founders had no way of anticipating the raw killing power of today's weapons.
The existence of modern methods of communications has NOTHING to do with this discussion. When someone challenges the use of the internet on first amendment grounds, THEN we will have something to talk about.
I'll leave it to people here who are far more well-versed in constitutional law and subsequent case law do discuss the fine points.
How well the Ferguson worked is irrelevant to the Founding Fathers' mechanical knowledge and imagination; it shows they knew firearms could advance beyond muskets. Remember that Franklin was smart enough to figure out electricity and Jefferson was a clever inventor.
Black powder residue impeded the development of repeaters and machine guns for another century. Within fifteen years of the invention of smokeless powder firearms advanced to nearly their modern forms as the old ideas became practical. Later designs haven't obsoleted the 1894 lever and 1898 bolt actions. The Mauser Broomhandle automatic pistol came out in 1896, the Browning and Luger autos in 1900.
"The earliest revolver was a three-barreled matchlock turnover carbine made in Italy around 1530."
-jsw
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