Posted on 12/31/2012 11:59:33 AM PST by jazusamo
Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shootings, said: "The British are not coming. ... We don't need all these guns to kill people." Lewis' vision, shared by many, represents a gross ignorance of why the framers of the Constitution gave us the Second Amendment. How about a few quotes from the period and you decide whether our Founding Fathers harbored a fear of foreign tyrants.
Alexander Hamilton: "The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed," adding later, "If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government." By the way, Hamilton is referring to what institution when he says "the representatives of the people"?
James Madison: "(The Constitution preserves) the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation ... (where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms."
Thomas Jefferson: "What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms."
George Mason, author of the Virginia Bill of Rights, which inspired our Constitution's Bill of Rights, said, "To disarm the people — that was the best and most effectual way to enslave them."
(Excerpt) Read more at creators.com ...
bttt
While would not characterize it as such, Lewis would have no problem with reestablishing "the plantation," so long as he was in charge. It has nothing to do with his color; everything to do with his leftism.
Righto.
At the time of the Revolution the riflemen of the back country were masters of a weapon that in several aspects was much more effective than anything commonly used by the British Army.
As a large detachment of that army discovered at King’s Mountain, and a great many British officers found out over the course of the war.
The long rifle was not, however, a viable weapon in a full-bore battle. Took several times as long to load. It wasn’t till the 1860s that a rapid-loading rifle became available. When it did, the days of massed infantry assaults were over, though it took another 50 years for the generals to get it thru their heads.
That’s the way it always is pardner. These districts are set up as affirmative action for Democrat Districts.
Th whole CBC got put into office that way.
I'm not so sure.
Most cities in the U.S. during the Revolution were located on the coasts and were dependent upon shipping.
The Militia surprised the occupying forces in Boston by taking the big guns from Fort Ticonderoga, dragging them to Boston, and placing them, during the night, on the hills surrounding Boston and Boston Harbor. This enabled the Militia to free Boston and sent their enemy's army and navy scurrying away.
It was not long before the enemy ships showed up in New York and used the surprise provided by their navy's mobility to take New York.
At the end of the war, if not for the timely arrival of the French navy off Yorktown, Virginia, the enemy may have been able to make off in its ships and simply relocate again.
Washington was very careful to avoid LOSING the war in any given battle and was able to survive to see a decisive victory.
Similarly, the people of the U.S. need to simply avoid losing a key battle to eventually win the war against the counter-Revolutionaries who wish to eliminate our right to keep and bear arms.
I do not understand your point. I was addressing specifically the firepower or weaponry each side had, not the strategy with which they were used.
If we are going to talk strategy, the Americans were foolish to repeatedly try for battlefield victory. Guerrilla warfare was more effective in their circumstances. However, the idea of guerrilla warfare wasn’t well developed yet, and patriot reliance on it might have demoralized their supporters so much they would have given in to the King.
Weaponry was almost identical. In fact, for the first couple years the biggest armament advantage the Brits had was their bayonets, which the colonists were slow to get. Also the colonists often had considerable difficulty with the quantity and quality of their gunpowder.
That the British won most of the battles throughout the war was a consequence of their generally greater skill and discipline, especially against militia, not of any weaponry advantage.
I’m not addressing the naval issue, where obviously the Royal Navy outclassed any possible American fleet by ridiculous amounts.
Well I heard on the car radio that he was just notified that his wife died today. I guess unexpectedly.
I did as you suggested. What's the 'problem' I was supposed to see 'right off'?
If you didn’t see it there is no need to explain it.
My point is that the Royal Navy was an instrument of mobility and massive firepower. The naval guns dominated any port city. Had the Royal Navy not been opposed by the French at Yorktown, then the war would not have ended with the surrender of Cornwallis and the Revolution might well have been unsuccessful.
Without the cannon from Ticonderoga, Boston might well have remained under occupation and Boston could have been reinforced rather than abandoned.
bttt
The British could not win the war by occupying seaports. They had to somehow either crush the rebellion or convince the colonists to give up.
I disagree that the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown was essential to the ending of the war.
The British were losing, strategically speaking, from the very beginning. Their basic problem was that the colonies had no single vulnerable spot. Unless the British could break the colonists’ will to resist, they would have to conquer and occupy the entire country and hold it down by military force. This was quite beyond their capabilities.
They first attempted to crush the center of disaffection in MA, succeeeding mainly in rallying the other colonies to their defense.
Then they occupied the strategic point of NY, very nearly destroying the American army in the process. Closest they ever came to winning. But no sense of urgency kept them from following thru.
They they tried their best-conceived strategic move, Burgoyne’s invasion from Canada combined with a thrust up the Hudson. But the Brits in NYC preferred to go haring off the Philadelphia to win “glory” for themselves by conquering the “capital” of the rebellion. Burgoyne got trapped, the French entered the war, and victory became quite impossible, though it took them a number of years to admit to it.
Aside from various raids on coastal objectives, the major following move was an attempt to roll the colonies up from the South, the mission Cornwallis was engaged in when he got trapped at Yorktown.
The British could march anywhere they wanted in the South, and won almost all the battles, but the minute their army marched on the militias closed in behind them and their “conquest” vanished.
The British basic problem was the same one the Union had in our Civil War. The Americans (and the South) only had to avoid losing, the British (and the Union) had to win.
The Union figured out how to accomplish this, the British never did.
BTTT!
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