Only 13% of the colonials had access to a gun.
But getting back to guns; firearms were not part of early American culture and no, most colonial Americans not only did not own guns prior to the war, most had never even fired one. Our forefathers and leaders of revolt knew this. They spent the few years leading up to hostilities struggling to smuggle guns from Europe. So, when the time came, they were able to provide their militias with something other than pikes and axes and a few well laid oaths against the bloody redcoats.
By Harry Schenawolf, author of the Shades of Liberty Series about African American soldiers in the American Revolution. Remember that scene in The Patriot where Mel Gibson scooped up a bunch of gun…
revolutionarywarjournal.com
With your web browser, click on the Britannica link and hit search/find and try typing in gun. When the search comes up blank, try guns. And when the search comes up blank again, put the Hollywood and Disney films away, and if your history teacher said it was about guns, find out where they live and go kick them up the underpants for lying to you.
The American Revolution (1775–83) was an insurrection carried out by 13 of Great Britain’s North American colonies, which won political independence and went on to form the United States of America. The war followed more than a decade of growing estrangement between the British crown and many...
www.britannica.com
The colonies had been getting disgruntled for a while, hence time to try and smuggle guns in, and they weren't happy with taxation. But like everything American, you have to try and beef it up.
Did you know, you can lead a happy and successful life without strutting around like John Wayne, whopping, and slapping one another over the most irrelevant everyday happenings. So take a chill pill, it wasn't about guns.
Would appear you may have been suckered in by a biased report(s) and author(s).
One alternative take here;
...
III. COUNTING GUNS IN 1774 COLONIAL AMERICA
While the Providence data are excellent for showing high levels
of gun ownership in one New England town in one period, the more
relevant question is: What was the pattern of gun ownership
throughout the country? Fortunately, we can build on the extra-
ordinary collection of 919 probate inventories from 1774 (a few were
from 1773 and early 1775)"5 that Alice Hanson Jones published in
1978. Not only is this a large collection of published inventories
transcribed from handwritten records, but Jones took extraordinary
steps to achieve a representative sample of the entire wealth-
holding population of the country in 1774. She then weighted each
inventory to account for her sampling design, the age distribution
of the population, and the likelihood of being probated. This allowed
COUNTING GUNS IN EARLY AMERICA
her to generate wealth and property ownership estimates for the
wealth-holding population and the probate-type wealth-holding
population.
Because the entire wealth-holding population is a larger part of
the U.S. population than the probate-type wealth-holding
population, we have used weights for the wealth-holding population
(even though this results in about 2% lower gun ownership than if
we used the probate-type population). The counts and percentages
in our charts are weighted to match the wealth-holding population
of the Thirteen Colonies in 1774. These weights affect the levels of
guns only slightly; thus, compared to the raw, unweighted per-
centages, the weighted frequencies of guns differ by only a few
percentage points.
...
WILLIAM AND MARY LAW REVIEW
Guns were common in 1774 estates, even in admittedly
incomplete probate records-overall, 50% of all wealthholders in the
Thirteen Colonies in 1774 owned guns.62 Among male probate-type
wealthholders, 54% owned guns listed in their estates. Moreover,
guns were mostly in good condition. About 87% of itemized male
estates with guns listed at least one gun that was not listed as old
or in poor working condition.
Not all of these estates have itemized inventories of personal
property including household property. For example, an estate
that lists only real estate or "house and its contents," or only crops
and farm implements, is not sufficiently complete to count as an
itemized estate. If one sets aside just these thirty estates without
substantial itemization and the eighty-one female estates,' that
leaves 813 itemized male estates.64 Charts 3 through 5 set out char-
acteristics65 of these itemized male estates.
As Chart 3 shows, 54% of itemized male estates in 1774 had guns;
47% of estates had guns not listed as old or in poor condition. This
compares with a higher rate of books (62%) and much lower
percentages of Bibles or religious books (27%). Almost as interesting
as the high level of gun ownership is the low level of swords,
cutlasses, bayonets, and other blade or edged weapons (14% of
estates). Indeed, based on probate records, in colonial America in
...
WILLIAM AND MARY LAW REVIEW
1774, the relative odds of a male wealthholder owning a gun were
seven times as high as the odds of him owning an edged weapon.
In early America, gun ownership was higher in rural areas than
in urban areas (56% to 45%). Moreover, 60% of estates that list
livestock also list guns, compared to only 22% of estates not owning
livestock-owning livestock being a strong indicator of current
(rather than past) farming activity. Although estates with few
slaves owned no more guns (46%) than estates without slaves (48%),
gun ownership among the bulk of slave-owning estates (with slaves
valued >282.5) was very high-81%. Indeed, the odds that large
slaveholders would own guns is 4.3 times as high as the odds of gun
ownership for estates without large numbers of slaves.
There are some differences between colonies and regions (Charts
5-6). Southern estates have many more guns than other regions
(69%). The lowest gun ownership was observed in a string of states
from Connecticut and New York to New Jersey and Pennsylvania,
only 35-44% of whose estates had guns (Chart 6).
Among occupations (Chart 7), farmers have slightly more guns
(58%) than other occupations. Those with missing occupations have
many fewer guns (only 9%), suggesting that incompleteness of
probate inventories is an important possible reason for an inventory
lacking guns, even among male estates with itemized inventories.
Total physical wealth is related to gun ownership, with 74-78% of
the most elite estates having guns and only 7% of the poorest
probate estates owning guns.
...
About pages 1798 - 1806.
While there is a lot of variables per colony/region and economic status, etc. looks to be a bit more than just 13%.
Admittedly there were many situations where the militia had few firearms, or any weapons (edged - blade), but there were also many more cases where a significant number appear to have been more armed than than biased sources like 'Harry Schenawolf' would suggest.
