“It occurred to me that I should add some historical context ...Stamp Act...1765, ten years before the Shot Heard Round the World...a group decided that the Tea Tax was unjustified and destroyed a shipment of tea...led to the occupation of Boston...the revolutionaries STOLE the big guns from Fort Ticonderoga...convinced the forces occupying Boston to leave the city...eventually led to the ratification of the Second Amendment...duty...to resist confiscation and pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor in pursuit of maintaining our liberties and opposing the depredations of a tyrannical government.” [William Tell, post 101]
Reads more like a post-1789 propaganda pamphlet than an accurate summary of causes of AWI.
The chief event that pushed Colonists toward separation was a major change in British policies during and after the Seven Years War. Before 1756, British policy was to let Colonists govern their own affairs. After 1763, the British government decided the Colonists had to pay the bill for their own defense: more taxation was then a given. Much other Colonial activity had been nominally illegal, but enforcement was spotty & lax: Rhode Island was foremost in smuggling for decades before 1763.
The British government had concluded a number of treaties with various American Indian groups; in return for help in the Seven Years War, the British agreed to prevent the Colonists from spreading west of the Appalachian Mountains or north of the Ohio River. Ever land-hungry and expansionist, Colonists (many descended from landless classes in the British Isles and Continental Europe, or recent immigrants from such places), took this poorly.
The British won the Seven Years War but their government was deeply in debt; it had also acquired large new territories around the globe pursuant to the peace treaty, requiring still great administrative and defense expenditures. Taxing the Colonists sounded like a great way to retire the debt and offset expenses. As has often happened, higher taxes (still laughably low by today’s standards) led to stiffer enforcement and curtailment of liberties generally.
By the mid-18th century, American Colonists were becoming vastly richer & more successful, acquiring trading interests and numerous enterprises at ever-widening areas in the Western Hemisphere. Upper & commercial classes rose and prospered, perhaps the richest in Rhode Island, center of smuggling - based on the slave trade. They deemed themselves British subjects possessed of all the rights & privileges enjoyed by Britishers who lived at home in the British Isles.
The perceptions & attitudes of British subject still living “back home” differed sharply from those of the Colonists. It was “common knowledge” in the British Isles, that no Colonist was the equal of the lowest-class laborer or street person “back home.” Prominent citizens, upper-crust rich folks of the Colonies were routinely cheated & shortchanged by merchants and agents in the British Isles.
IN June 1772, Rhode Island smugglers attacked and burned HMS Gaspee, a Royal Navy Schooner enforcing customs laws and chasing other smugglers. The Colonists shot Gaspee’s captain; he was expected to die but he recovered. Royal authorities collared the ringleaders and prepared to haul them back to Britain for trial. Colonists took it poorly, all over the Eastern Seaboard: transporting for trial on undisclosed charges ran exactly counter to all British common law and custom, and prior British government behavior in the Colonies.
This “Gaspee Affair” upset the Colonial public and was talked about far more widely than the subsequent Boston Tea Party, a minor local incident in which no one was killed or injured, and only private property was destroyed. Its legal and policy import was much larger also.
Against these developments (later viewed by Americans as provocations), the occupation of Boston and affrays at Lexington and Concord, were minor but incendiary. By April 1775, British troops had already made repeated attempts to confiscate public stores of arms in outlying spots near Boston, but had failed.
Events were chaotic in 1775. Benedict Arnold (until a few days before, a merchant vessel owner/master) and Ethan Allen decided (each on their own) to take Fort Ticonderoga, then on the New York frontier, on 10 May. Built by the French, it had fallen into disrepair after the victory at Quebec in the Seven Years War and held a small British detachment; guns were there, but no powder. Not until winter did George Washington’s forces hit upon the notion of sledding the guns to Boston, to intimidate the British garrison. The bluff worked; British forces withdrew to New York and kept it until after the war.
The notion of America as an independent nation was the fantasy of a only a handful of the wackier revolutionary conspirators as late as early 1776.
I wasn't trying to summarize the causes of the war. I was trying to illustrate one example of why our Founders ratified the Second Amendment. It was important for future generations to have the equipment readily at hand to oppose tyranny.