Throughout the 19th century, firearms enhanced extra than in any other century. As of 1800, most firearms had been single-shot muzzleloading blackpowder flintlocks. By finish of the century, semiautomatic pistols making use of detachable magazines with modern day gunpowder and metallic cartridges had been readily available. Would the Founders be shocked by the improvements in capacity to physical exercise Second Amendment rights? Probably not, provided the tremendous advances in firearms that had taken spot ahead of 1791. And definitely not, provided that James Madison, author of the Second Amendment, initiated a federal government industrial with the certain aim of vastly enhancing the good quality and quantity of firearms manufacture.
Portion I of this post briefly describes Some of the firearms advances ahead of 1791. Portion II describes the federal industrial policy for advancing firearms technologies.
This post is primarily based on my short article The History of Bans on Forms of Arms Ahead of 1900. It is forthcoming in Notre Dame’s Journal of Legislation, vol. 50, no. two, in 2024. The Post also draws on chapter 23 of my coauthored textbook Firearms Law and the Second Amendment: Regulations, Rights, and Policy (Aspen Pub., 3d ed. 2022).
I. Firearms improvements ahead of 1791
Whilst the Founders could not foresee all the certain advances that would take spot in the nineteenth century, the Founders had been effectively conscious that firearms had been acquiring improved and improved.
Tremendous improvements in firearms had usually been element of the American encounter. The initially European settlers in America had mostly owned matchlocks. When the trigger is pressed, a smoldering hemp cord is lowered to the firing pan the powder in the pan then ignites the most important gunpowder charge in the barrel.
The initially firearm extra trusted than the matchlock was the wheel lock, invented by Leonardo da Vinci. In a wheel lock, the powder in the firing pan is ignited when a serrated wheel strikes a piece of iron pyrite. The wheel lock was the initially firearm that could be kept loaded and prepared for use in a sudden emergency. Though matchlock pistols had existed, the wheel lock created pistols far extra sensible and popular. Paul Lockhart, Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare 80 (2021).
The wheel lock was the “preferred firearm for cavalry” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Id. The proliferation of wheel locks in Europe in the sixteenth century coincided with the homicide price falling by half. See Carlisle E. Moody, Firearms and the Decline of Violence in Europe: 1200-2010, 9 Rev. Eur. Stud. 53 (2017)
Nonetheless, wheel locks price about 4 instances as significantly as matchlock. In addition, their moving components had been far extra complex than the matchlocks’. Beneath situations of difficult use in North America, wheel locks had been also delicate and also tough to repair. The path of technological advancement frequently requires costly inventions sooner or later major to items that are very affordable to typical buyers and are even improved than the original invention. That has been the story of firearms in America.
Flintlocks quintuple the price of fire
The gun that was even improved than the wheel lock, but easier and significantly less costly, was the flintlock. The earliest versions of flintlocks had appeared in the mid-sixteenth century. But not till the finish of the seventeenth century did most European armies replace their matchlocks with flintlocks. Americans, individually, created the transition significantly sooner. Lockhart at 106.
Indian warfare in the thick woods of the Atlantic seaboard was primarily based on ambush, rapid raids, and rapid person choice-producing in combat—the opposite of the extra orderly battles and sieges of European warfare. In America, the flintlock became a necessity.
In contrast to matchlocks, flintlocks can be kept usually prepared. For the reason that blackpowder is hygroscopic, and could be ruined by significantly water, it was popular to shop a firearm on the mantel above the fireplace. A different benefit, which mattered drastically in America but was mainly irrelevant for European warfare, is that a flintlock, in contrast to a matchlock, has s no smoldering hemp cord to give away the place of the user. Flintlocks are extra trusted than matchlocks—all the extra so in adverse climate, even though nonetheless far from impervious to rain and moisture. Drastically, Flintlocks are significantly easier and more quickly to reload than matchlocks. See, e.g., W.W. Greener, The Gun and Its Improvement 66-67 (9th ed. 1910) Charles C. Carlton, This Seat of Mars: War and the British Isles 1585-1746, at 171-73 (2011).
Initially, the flintlock could not shoot additional or extra accurately than a matchlock. Lockhart at 105. But it could shoot significantly extra swiftly. A matchlock requires extra than a minute to reload after. Id. at 107. In skilled hands, a flintlock could be fired and reloaded 5 instances in a minute, even though below the strain of combat, 3 instances a minute was a extra standard price. Id. at 107-08. Compared to a matchlock, a flintlock was extra most likely to ignite the gunpowder charge instantaneously, rather than with a delay of some seconds. Id. at 104. “The flintlock gave infantry the capacity to produce an overwhelmingly greater level of firepower.” Id. at 107.
The Theoretical Lethality Index (TLI) is a measure of a weapon’s effectiveness in military combat. The TLI of a seventeenth century musket is 19 and the TLI of an eighteenth century flintlock is 43. Trevor Dupuy, The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare 92 (1984). So the transition of firearm kind in the American colonies extra than doubled the TLI. There is no cause to think that the American Founders had been ignorant of how significantly improved their personal firearms had been compared to these of the early colonists.
Joseph Belton’s 16-shot model
In 1777 in Philadelphia, inventor Joseph Belton demonstrated a firearm that could fire 16 shots all at after. The committee watching the demonstration integrated Common Horatio Gates, Common Benedict Arnold, and scientist David Rittenhouse. They wrote to the Continental Congress and urged the adoption of Belton guns for the Continental Army. Congress voted to order a hundred–while requesting that they be made as eight-shot models, because gunpowder was scarce. Nonetheless, the deal fell by means of due to the fact Congress could not afford the higher price tag that Belton demanded. Repeating arms had been costly, due to the fact their modest internal elements call for specifically complicated and precise fitting.
Therefore, the Founders who served in the Second Continental Congress had been effectively conscious that a 16-shot gun had been made, and was feasible to make in quantity, for a higher price tag. Delegates to the 1777 Continental Congress included future Supreme Court Chief Justice Samuel Chase, John Adams, Samuel Adams, Francis Dana, Elbridge Gerry, John Hancock, the two Charles Carrolls from Maryland, John Witherspoon (President of Princeton, the good American college for totally free believed), Benjamin Harrison (father and grandfather of two Presidents), Francis Lightfoot Lee, and Richard Henry Lee .
The Girardoni rifle
Likewise, the 22-shot Girardoni rifle famously carried by the Lewis & Clark expedition beginning in 1803 was no secret, as it had been invented in 1779. It was utilized by the Austrian army as a sniper rifle. Powered by compressed air, its bullet his as difficult as the modern day Colt .45ACP cartridge. John Paul Jarvis, The Girandoni Air Rifle: Deadly Beneath Stress, Guns.com, Mar. 15, 2011.
The Girardoni had a 21 or 22 round caliber tubular magazine, and could be rapidly reloaded with 20 extra rounds, making use of speedloading tubes that came with the gun. Right after about 40 shots, the air reservoir could be exhausted, and would need to have to be pumped up once more.
Repeaters in ordinary commerce
As of 1785, South Carolina gunsmith James Ransier of Charleston, South Carolina, was marketing 4-shot repeaters for sale. Columbian Herald (Charleston), Oct. 26, 1785.
The American Rifle
The founding generation was specifically conscious of 1 of the most popular firearms of their time, the Pennsylvania-Kentucky rifle, which is also named “The American Rifle.” The rifle was invented by German and Swiss gunsmith immigrants in the early eighteenth century. When they came to Pennsylvania for religious freedom, they had been familiar with the heavy Jaeger rifles of Central Europe.
The American Rifle was developed initially for the demands of frontiersmen who could possibly invest months on a hunting expedition in the dense American woods. “What Americans demanded of their gunsmiths seemed not possible”: a rifle that weighed ten pounds or significantly less, for which a month of ammunition would weigh 1 to 3 pounds, “with proportionately modest quantities of powder, be effortless to load,” and “with such velocity and flat trajectories that 1 fixed rear sight would serve as effectively at fifty yards as at 3 hundred, the required but slight distinction in elevation getting supplied by the user’s encounter.” Robert Held, The Age of Firearms: A Pictorial History 142 (1956). “By about 1735 the not possible had taken shape” with the creation of the iconic American Rifle. Id.
As for the most popular American firearm, the smoothbore (nonrifled) flintlock musket, there had also been good advances. To a casual observer, a standard flintlock musket of 1790 appears incredibly equivalent to flintlock musket of 1690. Nonetheless, improvements in modest components, some of them internal, had created the finest flintlocks far superior to their ancestors. For instance, thanks to English gunsmith Henry Nock’s 1787 patented flintlock breech, “the gun shot so difficult and so rapid that the incredibly possibility of such efficiency had hitherto not even been imaginable.” Id. at 137.
The Founders had been effectively conscious that what had been not possible or unimaginable to 1 generation could grow to be commonplace in the subsequent. With the federal armories sophisticated investigation and improvement system that started in the Madison administration, the U.S. government did its finest to make the not possible feasible.
II. James Madison and James Monroe, the founding fathers of modern day firearms
U.S. Representative James Madison is effectively-identified as the author of the Second Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights. What is not effectively-identified is how his presidency place the United States on the path to mass production of higher-good quality very affordable firearms.
For the reason that of weapons procurement issues for the duration of the War of 1812, President Madison’s Secretary of War James Monroe, who would succeed Madison as President, proposed a system for sophisticated weapons investigation and production at the federal armories, which had been situated in Springfield, Massachusetts, and Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The Madison-Monroe system was to subsidize technological innovation. Ross Thomson, Structures of Adjust in the Mechanical Age: Technological Innovation in the United States 1790-1865, at 54-59 (2009). It was enthusiastically adopted with the help of each the main parties in Congress: the Madison-Monroe Democratic-Republicans, and the opposition Federalists. eight Stat. 204 (1815) Johnson, Kopel, Mocsary, Wallace & Kilmer, Firearms Law and the Second Amendment: Regulation, Rights, and Policy 2209 (3d ed. 2022) (on line chapter 23).
Whilst serving as ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson had observed the progress that the French had been producing in making firearms with interchangeable components. He enthusiastically encouraged that the United States do the identical. See Letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Jay (Secretary of Foreign Affairs below the Confederation government), Aug. 30, 1785, in 1 Memoirs, Correspondence, and Private Papers, of Thomas Jefferson 299 (Thomas Jefferson Randolph ed., 1829). In 1801, President Jefferson recounted his French observations to Virginia Governor James Monroe and expressed hope for Eli Whitney’s strategy for interchangeable gun components. Letter from Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, Nov. 14, 1801, in 35 The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson 662 (Barbara B. Oberg ed., 2008).
Beneath the bipartisan Madison-Monroe system, generous federal arms procurement contracts had lengthy lead instances and created significantly of the payment up-front, so that producers could invest a number of years setting up and perfecting their factories. The system succeeded beyond expectations, and helped to produce the American industrial revolution.
The initial objective was interchangeability, so that firearms components broken in combat could be replaced by functional spare components. Right after that would come greater prices of factory production. And following that, it was hoped, production at reduce price than artisanal production. Attaining these objectives for the extra intricate and closer-fitting components of repeating firearms would be even extra tough.
To carry out the federal system, the inventors related with the federal armories initially had to invent machine tools. Contemplate for instance, the wooden stock of a lengthy gun. The back of the stock is held against the user’s shoulder. The middle of the stock is exactly where the action is attached. (The action is the element of the gun containing the moving components that fire the ammunition the Founding generation named it “the lock.”) For several guns, the forward element of the stock would include a groove to hold the barrel.
Producing a stock calls for several unique cuts of wood, couple of of them straight. The
artisanal gunmaker would reduce with hand tools such as saws and chisels. Necessarily, 1 artisanal stock would not be precisely the identical size as an additional.
To make stocks more quickly and extra uniformly, Thomas Blanchard invented fourteen unique machine tools. Every single machine would be set up for 1 certain reduce. As the stock was reduce, it would be moved from machine to machine. By mounting the stock to the machine tools with jigs and fixtures, a manufacturer could guarantee that each and every stock would be placed in precisely the identical position in the machine as the earlier stock. The mounting was in relation to a bearing — a certain spot on the stock that was utilized as a reference point. To verify that the a variety of components of the firearm, and the machine tools themselves, had been constant, several new gauges had been invented. Felicia Johnson Deyrup, Arms Makers of the Connecticut Valley: A Regional Study of the Financial Improvement of the Compact Arms Sector, 1798-1870, at 97-98 (1948) Thomson at 56–57.
What Blanchard did for stocks, John H. Hall, of the Harpers Ferry Armory, did for
other firearms components. Hall shipped some of his machine tools to Simeon North, in Connecticut. In 1834, Hall and North created interchangeable firearms. This was the initially time that geographically separate factories had created interchangeable components. Id. at 58 Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technologies: The Challenge of Adjust 212 (1977).
For the reason that Hall “established the efficacy” of machine tools, he “bolstered the self-assurance amongst arms makers that 1 day they would realize in a bigger, extra effective manner, what he had carried out on a restricted scale. In this sense, Hall’s perform represented an crucial extension of the industrial revolution in America, a mechanical synthesis so unique in degree as to constitute a distinction in sort.” Id. at 249.
The technological advances from the federal armories had been extensively shared amongst American producers. The Springfield Armory constructed up a big network of cooperating private entrepreneurs and insisted that advances in manufacturing strategies be extensively shared. By mid-century, what had begun as the mass production of firearms from interchangeable components had grow to be globally identified as “the American program of manufacture”—a program that encompassed sewing machines, and, sooner or later typewriters, bicycles, and automobiles. See, e.g., David R. Meyer, Networked Machinists: Higher-Technologies Industries In Antebellum America 81-84, 252-62, 279-80 (2006).
Springfield, in western Massachusetts on the Connecticut River, had been selected for the federal armory in element due to the fact of its abundance of waterpower and for the nearby iron ore mines. Quite a few private entrepreneurs, like Colt and Smith & Wesson, created the identical decision. The Connecticut River Valley became identified as the Gun Valley. It was the Silicon Valley of its instances, the center of industrial revolution. Id. at 73–103, 229–80.
In brief, the Founding generation was familiar with tremendous advances in firearms technologies. In the American colonial encounter, the price of fire for an ordinary firearm had quintupled. As of 1791, repeating firearms capable of firing 16 or 22 shots had been demonstrated, but they had been significantly also costly for ordinary citizens. The Madison-Monroe administration’s sensible industrial policy, continued below future administrations, led the way towards the mass production of higher good quality firearms at low rates. No 1 in 1791 or 1815 could have foreseen all the firearms innovations in the 19th century. We do know that the American federal government did all it could to make these innovations feasible.