I suspect Trinopus may have been referring to the puckle gun, which was kind of like a flintlock gattling gun, made in the early 18th century. Gun people use it to argue that they had automatic or semi-automatic weapons at the time that 2A was drafted. But only one was ever made.
The difference between the late 18th century and today in terms of how armies were raised and funded and what their purpose was just cannot be overstated.
In 1789, a standing army represented a worrying threat to a new republic. For one thing, they were exceptionally expensive, and the new United States of America was not exactly swimming in cash. For another, armies were not the institutions we think of them as today. Today’s armies are seen as bands of apolitical fighting heroes, but that’s after a few centuries of practice with constitutional democracy and it’s really only true in stable, rule-of-law countries. In 1789 the armies they would have been familiar with from Europe were often highly political things indeed and were often little better than swarms of locusts.
The framers of the Constitution, correctly, saw standing armies as a necessary evil at best and a threat to the republic at worst. That’s why they have to be funded two years at a time (but a navy does not; navies are inherently professional and take a long time to build.) A militia was generally sufficient to serve as a national defense, because things back then moved slowly. You had time to organize one.
Things changed in the 19th century as industrialization and technical advances made armies bigger, faster, and more complicated.
The irony of people who claim being allowed to own AR-15s is important to prevent government tyranny is that they are 99% the same people who worship the military and want it to be huge and powerful - and yet a huge and powerful military is the other half of potential tyranny. If the US government ever became a tyranny it’d use that military against the people; logically, if your concern is tyranny, you shouldn’t want the army to be huge.
I’ve heard the argument that what people feared back in 1789 was that the federal government might decide not to maintain enough troops or deploy them for regional problems. Southerners were worried that the federal government might ignore slave uprisings and westerners were worried the federal government might ignore Indian attacks. So states wanted to make sure they had the right to build up their own local military units if needed.
For another, armies were not the institutions we think of them as today.
This had also been a factor in the relationship of monarch and parliament in the UK, and the history of that must have been in the minds of the writers of your constitution. Parliament created the first (more or less) standing army in the civil war only to find soldiers wanting more of a say in the future political settlement after the war than the gentry who controlled parliament; and both distrusted the idea of any sort of an army under the control of the monarch. So the eventual compromise was that parliament would only authorise an army for a year at a time, and that continued until 1955!
There likely was that concern, plus of course there was just the fact that it took forever for armies to move. A base of forces in South Carolina was of little value in Michigan. This is a time when it was scarcely less difficult to get from Massachusetts to Georgia than it was to get from Massachusetts to England. America had effectively no transportation infrastructure.
If one looks at a map of Revolutionary War battles, most of the really big ones took place in an area between White Plains, NY and the modern outskirts of Philadelphia, with a few in Massachusetts. Even most of the big ones outside that, like Saratoga, still were not that far in modern terms. Today you can hop in a car and basically see most of the geography of the war in a day. But that was the logistical limit of the time. Washington could keep his army out of the fray by parking it in Valley Forge, which isn’t at all far from where the British were, in modern terms; moving an army from there to, say, Virginia, was a huge undertaking.
One of the biggest differences between war in 1776 and in 1861 was the availability of railroads and substantial riverine transport. Those enabled the strategic movement and support of armies on a scale incomprehensible to the generals of 1776.
This guy has an interesting take on this. This is a small portion of a three part series on gun control.
The militia has indeed played a role in an American conflict.
Battle of Athens
Actually the militia fought heavily in the revolutionary war, the war of 1812, and even the Civil war.
I was thinking of the one in Sharpe’s Rifles, which, apparently, was real. I don’t know if that’s the same guy as the one you’re describing. I’d never heard that only one was made. Anyway, one hell of a way to clear the quarterdeck, but not all that good for mass murder in today’s mode. (Too damn long to reload…)
(There was also a splay-barreled pistol with four barrels, also good to mow down a mutinous mob.)
I guess I question how “weird” it would have been. When we talk about “militia” we’re really just talking about the idea that the government would summon some subset of the free males of the community into temporary military or law enforcement-type service. It would have been very familiar to, at least, English history – the Anglo-Saxon fyrd, the medieval levies, the posse comitatus, etc. The pros and cons of this system were features in the English Civil War (and the New Model Army).
As noted elsewhere, the sheer size of the United States (even at the founding) would have posed a challenge for any standing army (and required a reliance on a “militia” from the earliest colonial days). But the idea of the militia as the primary fighting force (and a force for dealing with domestic unrest) would have been very familiar. As would the idea that each member of the militia would be expected to provide his own weapons (and, perhaps, that you could no longer field an army equipped with farming tools).
The weapon in Sharpe was a Nock Gun, which was a real if rather impractical weapon. I suppose if there’s a chance your ship will be boarded by pirates or enemy marines, better to have a Nock Gun and not need it than to need a Nock Gun and not have it.
Whatever happened to ship-to-ship boarding, anyway?
There are two big reasons for a militia.
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As has been stated, when we wrote our Constitution, we did not trust or want a standing army. A militia was supposed to address that. We pretty quickly figured out that no, we wanted an army, and a navy…
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There is a lot of historical documentation that implies that white men needed to be involved in militias in order to prevent slave rebellions, and less documentation, but its still there, that they were needed in case of Native American attacks. A standing army will not be able to respond to either of these events quickly enough to prevent things going sideways quickly - and, well, we didn’t want a standing army anyway. The second amendment probably has more to do with our racist past (and honestly, there is a lot of reason to believe that its current focus has more to do with our racist present) than the need for early Americans to hunt for their food.
Bear in mind, too, that in 1789, most of the United States did not have much in the way of law enforcement. Professional law enforcement wasn’t really a thing in the sense we understand it today; even the NYPD didn’t exist until the mid-19th century. Various places had night watches, sheriffs, or constabularies (and then “constabulary” was not a synonym for “police force” - it was an organization that only did police work part time and did a bunch of other stuff) but there wasn’t a lot of rhyme or reason to much of it. A militia could step in in the case of things that weren’t quite at the level of warfare, like riots, slave rebellions, and other sorts of disorder.
If the US government ever became a tyranny
Looking at this from outside, isn’t there a prior question - why and how would anyone consider that a practicable possibility? What in the normal operations of your constitution and political system would be so faulty as to facilitate it and require a popular uprising/resistance as a last resort against it?
Well, if close to half the people don’t care if the Constitution is upheld, and the President and a complicit Congress just ignore the Constitution and no one takes any substantive action to stop them, it could happen very quickly indeed. A democracy survives only if the people want it to.
Well, they had all met Aaron Burr.
If enough of the people want it to. The Weimar Republic was a democracy that was rather rapidly transformed into a dictatorship by a relative minority (the NSDAP earned some 37% of the vote in the election of '32, which is disturbingly similar to the firm base of support for Individual-ONE). If the public can be convinced of a need for strong leadership, they will tolerate almost anything as long as a critical mass are not being screwed over.
Yeah, I was going for the shorter, snappy version. Precisely what percentage of the people you need to support democracy I am not sure, but I am pretty confident that if 45% of the population don’t give a shit about rule of law and democracy, it is not going to last much longer. The people of a democracy don’t have to agree on who should be in charge, but there needs to be overwhelming agreement that it remain a democracy.
I’m 48, expect to live to roughly 75, and I think the odds the USA is still a democratic republic when I die is worse than fifty-fifty.