Easy; We are watching a superannuated dementor come to make Harry Potter alive for the gathered children!
It is scary. Lets hope they can keep that football away from him as long as possible!
Joe is wrong about cannon ownership:
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.”
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.
https://www.guns.com/news/2020/06/30/biden-fails-fact-check-on-revolutionary-war-cannon-ownership