If one wanted to have a bunch of soldiers march into an area and capture it, a musket was a far superior weapon to a rifle. While a musket could not be aimed accurately at an individual target the way a rifle could, a row of muskets firing simultaneously could do great damage to anything or anyone in front of it.
The problem for the British was that even though their soldiers could go anywhere they wanted, and the colonists didn't have the power to stop them, such ability wasn't of sufficient military use to justify the cost. If the British had simply sought to drive out the colonists from anyplace they captured, they could probably have cleared out the colonies so that new people could move in; the colonists' rifles would not have been able to stop that. On the other hand, the British were trying to put down a rebellion without displacing loyal subjects. That was a much greater challenge, and one the British could not meet.
That takes coordination, it was done by commands, relayed from the officers through the "sergeants". So the riflemen would pick off the officers and the sergeants while still out of musket range, turning the precise formations into a disorganized mob, which would either retreat or be picked off in turn. The only real advantage the musket had was rate of fire. Until the invention of the Mine ball that is. Even then it took lots of dead troops, even as late as the Civil War, for the Powers That Be to figure out that musket tactics weren't going to cut it anymore. Similar effect occurred with the invention of the Machine Gun.
***If one wanted to have a bunch of soldiers march into an area and capture it, a musket was a far superior weapon to a rifle***
True, only because the rifle was slower to load and did not have a bayonet. The Brown Bess was idiot proof but you still could not hit a person at 100 yards if you aimed at him. That is why British soldiers were NOT taught to aim, but just to point and shoot.
The rifle won the battle of King’s Mountain.
The British officers were very afraid of the Rifle as the colonists had a nasty habit of picking off officers. One officer wrote home that any officers going to fight in the colonies should make a will as he would probably end up shot.