I suspect nobody was in favor of us until the 19th century, so the words were not needed.
I’m not sure what the problem is.
The USA still glorifies the “wild west” and the time when law was remote and self-defence was the way to handle disputes. They had a more wild set of “disputes” with their internal displaced persons. They made a fetish, it seems, over the right to bear arms. They had a vicious civil war when the technology for creating bigger, badder, more accurate and more rapid-fire weapons was hitting its stride.
England did not have this culture. Canada has a much more peaceful culture and did not emphasize arming the population as a mean of keeping order, nor were our relations with the natives anywhere near as hostile as the Americans’. I doubt any of the other colonies from what I’ve read emphasized gun culture like the USA. Indeed, after 1948 the euro-continental authorities probably were pretty wary of an armed population.
The only wars that come to mind that rivalled the Civil War of the time were Crimea (now a peaceful backwater, eh?) and the Franco-Prussian war. Colonial wars were probably a lot more one-sided.
Another quick question - didn’t muzzle-loaders require that effective reloading happen somewhat close to vertical, which would make “lying low” a more difficult fighting posture as opposed to ditches and trenches. Certainly “reloading while charging” was not feasible and so frontal charges were more difficult and suicidal as range accuracy increased.
I think it was in Gwynne Dyer’s series War that I first heard that the Great War brought us the innovation of targeting civilians as part of the assault. His assertion was that previous wars involved armies facing off against each other, with civilians primarily feelings the after-effects, such as sacking. So, in terms of what they expected, this was probably a rather significant thing, which obviously established a new standard for conflict. No longer was the fighting confined to the battlefield and its environs, now the death and destruction could involve your hometown, many leagues away from the lines.
I am not so sure that the inhabitants of towns like Jaffa in what is now Israel would agree: The French army took the town in March 1799 and spent the next two or three days raping, killing and looting. "The soldiers cut the throats of men and women, the old and the young, Christians and Turks … father and son one on top of the other(on the same pile of bodies), a daughter being raped on the cadaver of her mother, the smoke from the burnt clothes of the dead, the smell of blood, the groans of the wounded, the shouts of the victors who were quarrelling about the loot taken from a dying victim." (Etienne-Louis Malus, a doctor who had accompanied the army)
When the British took Badajos in April 1812: “*Enraged at the huge amount of casualties they suffered in seizing the city, the troops broke into houses and stores consuming vast quantities of liquor with many of them then going on a rampage. Threatening their officers and ignoring their commands to desist, and even killing several, the troops massacred as many as 4,000 Spanish civilians. It took three days before the men were brought back into order. *”
Towns and cities in Europe tended to grow, either on trade routes such as ports, or around fortified places where they could retreat in the event of an attack, and also because that was where the money was.
It was only when these fortifications became obsolete, that battles began to be fought out in the open, so to speak.
Eschereal wrote that civilians felt the aftermath of a battle. I believe his point was that targeting civilians as a means of effecting the outcome of a battle is a fairly recent policy. It’s probably true; a modern army is now dependent on ongoing logistic support so targeting an army’s civilian base will defeat the army.
I don’t think I’d agree with Dyer, though, in calling it an invention of World War I. The policy had been used before in the American Civil War and the Boer War.
The civilians as spoils of war or forage victims is a time-honored tradition going back to the first conflict between villages, I’m sure. (Note the quote about Badajos that the soldiers acted against the orders of the command, this was not “policy”)
I would suggest instead the change came about in the second world war. With the advent of industrial might as the driving engine of war, the people who made the arms were a legitimate target along with their factories; as well as the steel makers, the power plants that supply the industry, and the factories that process the food for the soldiers, the plants that make trucks to take the supplies to the front, etc. - basically, the entire infrastructure. Also, as the Germans decided in 1940, never underestimate the morale effect of bringing the war home to the whole population; although in their case, it seems they misread the direction of the morale effect, not the propaganda power of it.
I suppose WWI escaped this problem due to the lack of reliable, long distance heavy load bombers. Air power is what makes it possible to bring the war to civilians.
of course, you could argue that again the American Civil War was the trailblazer in this regard - Sherman obviously recognized that destroying available industry, food supply, and especially railroads made a significant dent in the South’s military capacity.
Deliberately targeting civilians as a strategy of war goes back at least to late medieval/early Renaissance times, if not earlier. The term for this strategy in Western warfare was the Chevauchée, notably used during the Hundred Year’s War.
King Henry the fifth on burning out civilians: “War without fire is like sausages without mustard”.
Of course, this strategy was not used in all wars - it tends to vary. But it was certainly not unknown.
Central to the problem is your absurd notion that the machine gun had a large number of Americans as early designers due to some need for their use in the west against Indian tribes and/or for personal use. Both notions are patently false and entirely absurd; the designers may have been Americans but the market was in Europe, as dropzone noted Maxim made his gun on the advice that “If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others’ throats with greater facility.” The “Wild West” wasn’t fought with Gatling guns and Hotchkiss’. Personal ownership of fully automatic weapons is very highly regulated, personal ownership of machine guns in the military sense of the word doesn’t and didn’t happen; owning a Gatling or Maxim gun would be the equivalent, quite literally with the scale and how they were issued at the time, to the personal ownership of a 20lb Parrot rifle or a French 75 mm field gun.
This, and your earlier statement:
Are palpably absurd. If I may first quote Hilaire Belloc who put it rather eloquently,
Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.
For concrete evidence of Britain fighting continuous wars on a wild (colonial) frontier, let’s take a start date from your example of the Crimean War up until WWI and take a look at the list of wars Britain fought:
[ul]
[li]1853-56 Crimean War[/li][li]1856-57 The National War in Nicaragua[/li][li]1856-60 Second Opium War[/li][li]1856-57 Anglo-Persian War[/li][li]1857-58 Indian Rebellion[/li][li]1860-61 First Taranaki War[/li][li]1863-64 Second Anglo-Ashanti War[/li][li]1863-66 Invasion of Waikato[/li][li]1864-65 Bhutan War[/li][li]1867-74 Klang War[/li][li]1868-69 Titokowaru’s War[/li][li]1868 1868 Expidedition to Abyssinia[/li][li]1868-72 Te Kooti’s War[/li][li]1869 Red River Rebellion[/li][li]1873-74 Third Anglo-Ashanti War[/li][li]1877-78 Ninth Xhosa War[/li][li]1878-80 Second Anglo-Aghan War[/li][li]1879 Anglo-Zulu War[/li][li]1880-81 First Boer War[/li][li]1884-89 Mahdist War[/li][li]1885 Third Anglo-Burmese War[/li][li]1888 Sikkim Expedition[/li][li]1896 Anglo-Zanzibar War[/li][li]1899-1901 Boxer Rebellion[/li][li]1899-1902 Second Boer War[/li][li]1901-02 Anglo-Aro War[/li][li]1903-04 British Expedition to Tibet[/li][/ul]Now who was it that had a culture of fighting continuous wars against the natives again?
Once the battle lines coalesced civilians could flee the battle zone and be reasonably sure that direct attacks on them were unlikely. The Germans told themselves that their airships only attacked military objectives though their navigation abilities were so poor that they had little chance of striking any effective blow. The later Gotha raids attacked docks and arsenals in eastern London and the eastern counties but were limited in range. Their primary effect was on morale and diversion of effort rather than any material damage they did.
Traditionally any town which refused to surrender when summoned could expect no mercy when it eventually fell after siege - the inhabitants could expect to be put to the sword or sold into slavery.
My point was the government policy to arm the civilian population against a “wild west” of lawlessness. In Britain (or the rest of Europe). Civilians. Defending themselves against each other, “savages”, or lawless elements. I was not referring to colonial wars. Obviously my point was not clear.
Colonial wars, as far as I recall from superficial reading, were mainly by the British Army or those of other colonial powers - not usually by arming local militias and encouraging them to stand against the oncoming hordes on their own.
that’s my distinction - the USA placed the emphasis on the individual civilian arming themselves and using those arms, to an extent the more top-down authoritarian states, especially in Europe, did not. Europeans did not want their civilians wandering the streets with a pistol on their hip.
I will agree with you that the machine gun, or any such high-volume weapon, made no sense as a weapon except for armies in a crowded field of battle - until the roaring twenties. Weight and consumption of (expensive) ammo made it pretty useless for your average farmer, or outlaw gangs on horseback, even if reliability was not an issue.
However, the six-shooter seems to epitomize the gun culture that developed in the US West - as close to automatic as you could come in those days for a personal weapon, and most closely associated with the Wild West - although, like any useful invention, adopted around the world anywhere it was practical.
[QUOTE=Dissonance;17427071
1856-57 The National War in Nicaragua
[/QUOTE]
Tad unfair to pin that one on Britain 
I’m sorry, your point is still not clear, unless you are saying that the American love of guns is what drove them to be gun innovators, even if their intended market was mostly Europeans?
This seems directly at odds with your original statement, that Americans developed these guns for use on the frontier and in personal defense situations.
Certainly the six shooter plays a significant role in the defining image of Americans with guns on the frontier. But six-shooters aren’t Gatlin or Maxim guns.
You made two clearly false statements. First, quotes show the American gun designers were targeting European armies for their products. Second, Britain was engaged in near continuous war of one sort or another for the last half of the 19th century. True, the wars weren’t happening on the Island of Great Britain, but they were British.
I think 1968 was the first time that no shots were fired in anger by British forces anywhere, for the first time since there had been a Britain (1707).
I always thought some of the most interesting things about WWI were the sort of embryonic forms of technology that would prove far more effective and famous for their roles in the Second World War. Aircraft carriers, for example, saw their first combat use in WWI, and if the war had lasted another year or two, the Royal Navy was planning to use a massed carrier strike to try and sink the High Seas Fleet at their anchorage. They simply didn’t have the time to build or convert the necessary ships to launch torpedo bombers.
Given the difficulty that torpedo bombers would have in WWII, I can only assume what that experience would have been like for those aviators. Of course, given the difficulty that ships crews had with enemy bombers early in WWII, I can only imagine what the experience would have been like for the German sailors. I can’t imagine that Anti-Air defense was a huge priority for a warship in WWI, and I doubt that a 3 pound quick firing gun had much hope of hitting even a 1918-vintage bomber at low altitude.
As far as their expectations of the war, it is worth noting that battleships of the period were usually built with a ram bow, just in case two fleets of ships armed with guns capable of ranging each other from 10 miles away might decide to ram each other. Which sounds absurd, almost as absurd as the fact that the famous HMS Dreadnought only saw battle once in her career, where she rammed and sank a German submarine. By accident, from how the Wikipedia article reads.
The Wild West was mainly a fabrication by the media. First by dime novelists and yellow journalism and followed up by movies and tv shows. These depictions show gun fights and Indian raids were common events.
The reality was that the West during settlement was actually a fairly peaceful place. A few outlaws got lots of press, making it seem like crime was rampant. In reality, there was far more crime in the cities back east. It just didn’t get sensationalized like that in the west did.
Indian wars mainly occured when the Army tried to herd the remnants of various tribes onto reservations. While there were a few incidents outside these wars, for the most part Indians and settlers tried to live peacefully.
When citizens defending themselves in the West was mentioned, I thought of this advertisement.
“The most effective portable firearm in existence.” And still a (minor) contender! There are lighter, newer guns out there, but you don’t want to be downrange of a Trench Broom. And the others don’t look as cool.
By Trench Broom, which weapon are you referring two? I’ve heard it used to describe two or three different guns, including the Thompson Submachine Gun and the Winchester 12 gauge shotgun.
You change your mind after carrying one several miles down the road.
A guy I knew carried the radio in Korea, so he had an M- carbine. He hit a guy three times, seeing feathers flying from his jacket, and he kept coming. Another guy knocked him over with a Garand, so my friend tossed the carbine and carried a heavy Garand after that.