Actually most of the artillery used by our side in the American Revolution were privately owned,
Nonsense. Show us who owned ANY artillery
the second amendment was specifically intended to include the latest of all military equipment.
Exactly. For use in a militia.
You can NOT do that now. Machine guns? Nope. Missiles? Nope
Sorry, but that is all totally wrong.
The British never defended the colonists well, so they privately defended themselves even before the French and Indian War, and the Revolutionary War army used mostly privately owned cannon.
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Going back to 1638, the founding date of what is today The Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts– to this day a privately recruited military unit– local communities took it upon themselves to charter units of cannoneers.
By the 1740s, local artillery units were in
Rhode Island, New York, and Pennsylvania with the
official history of the latter’s Militia and National Guard noting that in 1747, largely through the efforts of Benjamin Franklin, a plan was undertaken by locals colonists to found companies of “horse, foot and artillery” that the volume stresses “was a purely volunteer organization, and was armed and equipped at its own expense, while its officers were selected by its members.”
Fast forward to the French and Indian War and local volunteer colonists fought alongside the British with one Boston-born engineer,
Richard Gridley, helping in the capture of French-held Fortress Louisbourg. Gridley would later show up in June 1775 at Bunker Hill, the first set-piece battle of the Revolutionary War– commanding a motley battery of scrounged up artillery, manned by volunteers, against the British.
THE BRITISH ARE COMING! (FOR THE CANNONS)
As things grew tense between the King and his increasingly unhappy subjects, those Americans yearning to be free exercised their inherent right to keep and bear arms by collecting artillery pieces that were not intended to be used in duck hunting. This included gathering up privately-held cannons, captured French war relics that were brought back as trophies, and, um,
borrowing guns directly from the Red Coats.
The British commander in Boston at the time, Lieutenant General Thomas Gage,
sent out spies with orders to find where the Patriots were keeping their military stores– most importantly to keep an eye peeled for artillery. They dutifully reported that, at the small town of Concord, they were “informed that they had fourteen pieces of cannon (ten iron and four brass) and two cohorns [light mortars]… their iron cannon they kept in a house in town, their brass they had concealed in some place behind the town, in a wood.”
The Massachusetts Committee of Safety, a Patriot organization of which John Hancock was a member before he placed his famous signature on the Declaration of Independence, came together on the eve of the Britsh move against the stash at Concord and issued orders to
shuffle around the assorted cannon and mortars under their control in something of a shell game to stay one step ahead of the King’s men.
Nonetheless, when the British famously marched on Concord on April 19, 1775– pausing along the way at Lexington for a meeting with the Minutemen and a “Shot Heard Round the World”– the Lobsterbacks
knocked the trunnions off several iron cannons too large to carry away and cut down the “liberty pole.”
While the newly formed Continental Army soon was able to lay hands on
better artillery— such as 58 British pieces seized by Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys at Fort Ticonderoga and
moved to Massachusetts by a Boston bookseller by the name of Henry Knox, as well as
two dozen guns swiped by a column that included a 20-year-old college dropout named Alexander Hamilton– it should be noted that the Founding Fathers never mentioned that ownership and circulation of artillery be curtailed following the war.
In fact, Hamilton, who went on to become an
artillery officer of some renown during the war, wrote in
Federalist 29 in 1788 that, “Little more can reasonably be aimed at, with respect to the people at large, than to have them properly armed and equipped…”
250+ YEARS WITHOUT REGULATION
Although the Militia Act of 1792, which largely governed state militias until the National Guard was established in 1903, outlined the common militia and how it could be called out, military historians can point to hundreds of locally raised private units that existed at the time with a myriad of uniforms, arms and, yes,
even artillery, of their choosing and ownership.
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In a recent interview, Vice President Joe Biden said during the Revolutionary War private citizens couldn't own cannons. That has been ranked as false.
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And you are also entirely wrong about private ownership of machine guns and missiles.
Not only is it illegal for the government to prevent private ownership of any weapon, if not for private ownership, then no one would be able to invent, produce, or sell weapons to the military. The only restriction on the most exotic of weapons is that they have to pay a high tax to cover the investigation to make sure they are stored and used safely.
And there are lots of legitimate civilian uses for these sorts of weapons. One would be as mercenary guards, security, etc., like Blackwater security in Iraq, but cannon, recoiless rifles, etc., are commonly used at private ski slopes in order to induce avalanches before they get too big and dangerous.
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One of the first things I was surprised to learn about firearms and firearm ownership in the United States was that I could legally own a machine gun. For clarity’s sake, let’s lay out what exactly a machine gun is.
According to the ATF, a “machinegun” (they present it as one word) is:
- Any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger
- The frame or receiver of any such weapon
- Any part designed and intended solely and exclusively or combination of parts designed and intended for use in converting a weapon into a machinegun, or
- Any combination of parts from which a machinegun can be assembled if such parts are in the possession or under the control of a person.
That first bullet point describes what is probably the most commonly-encountered form of machine gun in the American gun world. If you’ve got a gun that fires more than one projectile every time you pull the trigger, you’ve got a machine gun (or a malfunctioning semiauto that needs repair ASAP).
To understand American machine gun ownership, there’s a few laws one must familiarize themselves with. Machine guns are regulated under the National Firearms Act (NFA), which was originally passed in 1934. Items that also fall under the jurisdiction of the NFA include short barreled rifles (SBRs), short barreled shotguns (SBSs), suppressors, and “any other weapons” (AOWs—under which things like cane guns and other unique items fall). All of these “NFA items” must be registered with the federal government and are subject to a $200 tax (which was a substantial sum in 1934 dollars).
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Fully-transferable machine guns
FOPA mandated that machine guns manufactured before May 19, 1986 (the date that President Ronald Reagan signed FOPA into law) could be lawfully owned and transferred between unlicensed “civilians” who are not felons following the completion and approval of an application to the ATF, along with payment of the $200 “tax stamp” fee. Without exaggeration, every single registered machine gun owned by a non-dealer suddenly became much more valuable overnight—no “new” machine guns could be introduced to the “civilian” world after May 19, 1986.
Brown told me that there were an estimated 250,000 registered machine guns at the time of FOPA’s passage. Now, there are roughly 182,000 items on the registry. Wear and tear weigh hard on most select-fire guns.
As there are no new fully-transferable guns being added to the registry, the value of these firearms is ever-increasing. Entry into the “low end” of the transferable machine gun world in the form of something like a MAC-10 submachine gun will cost anywhere from $3,000 to $5,000. Higher ticket items like pristine M16 lowers and Thompson submachine guns can cost around $20,000 and up.
Pre-May dealer samples
Pre-May dealer samples can only be owned by Federal Firearms Licensees who pay a specific Special Occupational Tax (SOT) to take part in the importation, sale, and manufacture of NFA items. Pre-May dealer samples are machine guns that were registered and owned by dealers prior to the May 19, 1986 cutoff, and are
only transferable between dealers with the appropriate licenses.
However, if a dealer opts to cease paying their SOT in a given year, a pre-May dealer sample may become part of their private collection. This “feature” of pre-May samples makes them particularly attractive to dealers, and the market for pre-May samples is effectively hyper-limited to dealers alone.
Information is scant and incomplete regarding the number of pre-May dealer samples in circulation, though it is likely very low.
Post-May dealer samples
After May 19, 1986, new machine guns could only be made and imported by appropriately licensed dealers and manufacturers and government agencies. These post-May guns can only be owned by dealers who have paid the applicable SOT, and only after providing to the ATF a letter from a law enforcement or military unit explicitly requesting a demonstration of said guns (a “demo letter”).
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What makes a clip a clip, or a magazine a magazine? What the heck is a milsurp, and why are there all these online forums about it? These are a few of the questions I asked myself when I began to get serious about owning, collecting, and shooting firearms several years ago. But the most …
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