Through the 19th century, firearms enhanced far more 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 out there. Would the Founders be shocked by the improvements in capacity to physical exercise Second Amendment rights? Possibly not, provided the tremendous advances in firearms that had taken spot ahead of 1791. And surely 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.
Aspect I of this post briefly describes Some of the firearms advances ahead of 1791. Aspect II describes the federal industrial policy for advancing firearms technologies.
This post is primarily based on my report The History of Bans on Varieties 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
When 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 far better and far better.
Tremendous improvements in firearms had often been element of the American encounter. The 1st European settlers in America had primarily 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 key gunpowder charge in the barrel.
The 1st firearm far more reputable 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 1st firearm that could be kept loaded and prepared for use in a sudden emergency. While matchlock pistols had existed, the wheel lock produced pistols far far more 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)
Having said that, wheel locks price about 4 occasions as a great deal as matchlock. Furthermore, their moving components had been far far more complex than the matchlocks’. Beneath situations of tough use in North America, wheel locks had been as well delicate and as well complicated to repair. The path of technological advancement generally entails high priced inventions at some point major to goods that are economical to typical buyers and are even far better than the original invention. That has been the story of firearms in America.
Flintlocks quintuple the price of fire
The gun that was even far better than the wheel lock, but easier and much less high priced, 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, produced the transition a great deal sooner. Lockhart at 106.
Indian warfare in the thick woods of the Atlantic seaboard was primarily based on ambush, fast raids, and speedy person choice-producing in combat—the opposite of the far more orderly battles and sieges of European warfare. In America, the flintlock became a necessity.
As opposed to matchlocks, flintlocks can be kept often prepared. Simply because blackpowder is hygroscopic, and could be ruined by a great deal water, it was popular to retailer a firearm on the mantel above the fireplace. A different benefit, which mattered significantly in America but was mainly irrelevant for European warfare, is that a flintlock, as opposed to a matchlock, has s no smoldering hemp cord to give away the place of the user. Flintlocks are far more reputable than matchlocks—all the far more so in adverse climate, though nevertheless far from impervious to rain and moisture. Substantially, Flintlocks are a great deal 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 far more accurately than a matchlock. Lockhart at 105. But it could shoot a great deal far more swiftly. A matchlock requires far more than a minute to reload as soon as. Id. at 107. In knowledgeable hands, a flintlock could be fired and reloaded 5 occasions in a minute, though beneath the pressure of combat, 3 occasions a minute was a far more standard price. Id. at 107-08. Compared to a matchlock, a flintlock was far more 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 variety in the American colonies far more than doubled the TLI. There is no purpose to think that the American Founders had been ignorant of how a great deal far better 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 as soon as. The committee watching the demonstration incorporated 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 developed as eight-shot models, considering that gunpowder was scarce. Having said that, the deal fell by way of since Congress could not afford the higher value that Belton demanded. Repeating arms had been high priced, since their modest internal elements need 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 developed, and was achievable to generate in quantity, for a higher value. 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 wonderful American college for absolutely 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 made use of by the Austrian army as a sniper rifle. Powered by compressed air, its bullet his as tough 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 speedily reloaded with 20 far more rounds, making use of speedloading tubes that came with the gun. Right after about 40 shots, the air reservoir could be exhausted, and would require to be pumped up once again.
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 a single of the most popular firearms of their time, the Pennsylvania-Kentucky rifle, which is also known as “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 produced initially for the desires of frontiersmen who could possibly devote 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 much less, for which a month of ammunition would weigh a single to 3 pounds, “with proportionately modest quantities of powder, be straightforward to load,” and “with such velocity and flat trajectories that a single fixed rear sight would serve as effectively at fifty yards as at 3 hundred, the needed but slight distinction in elevation becoming 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 wonderful advances. To a casual observer, a fundamental flintlock musket of 1790 appears really related to flintlock musket of 1690. Having said that, improvements in modest components, some of them internal, had produced the greatest flintlocks far superior to their ancestors. For instance, thanks to English gunsmith Henry Nock’s 1787 patented flintlock breech, “the gun shot so tough and so speedy that the really possibility of such functionality had hitherto not even been imaginable.” Id. at 137.
The Founders had been effectively conscious that what had been not possible or unimaginable to a single generation could come to be commonplace in the subsequent. With the federal armories sophisticated investigation and improvement plan that started in the Madison administration, the U.S. government did its greatest to make the not possible achievable.
II. James Madison and James Monroe, the founding fathers of modern day firearms
U.S. Representative James Madison is effectively-recognized as the author of the Second Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights. What is not effectively-recognized is how his presidency place the United States on the path to mass production of higher-good quality economical firearms.
Simply because of weapons procurement challenges for the duration of the War of 1812, President Madison’s Secretary of War James Monroe, who would succeed Madison as President, proposed a plan for sophisticated weapons investigation and production at the federal armories, which had been situated in Springfield, Massachusetts, and Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The Madison-Monroe plan was to subsidize technological innovation. Ross Thomson, Structures of Modify in the Mechanical Age: Technological Innovation in the United States 1790-1865, at 54-59 (2009). It was enthusiastically adopted with the assistance of each the big 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 the internet chapter 23).
When serving as ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson had observed the progress that the French had been producing in generating firearms with interchangeable components. He enthusiastically encouraged that the United States do the exact same. See Letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Jay (Secretary of Foreign Affairs beneath 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 program 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 plan, generous federal arms procurement contracts had extended lead occasions and produced a great deal of the payment up-front, so that companies could devote many years setting up and perfecting their factories. The plan 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 immediately after that, it was hoped, production at reduced price than artisanal production. Attaining these objectives for the far more intricate and closer-fitting components of repeating firearms would be even far more complicated.
To carry out the federal plan, the inventors linked with the federal armories 1st had to invent machine tools. Take into consideration for instance, the wooden stock of a extended 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 known as it “the lock.”) For several guns, the forward element of the stock would include a groove to hold the barrel.
Creating a stock demands several various cuts of wood, couple of of them straight. The
artisanal gunmaker would reduce with hand tools such as saws and chisels. Necessarily, a single artisanal stock would not be precisely the exact same size as a different.
To make stocks more quickly and far more uniformly, Thomas Blanchard invented fourteen various machine tools. Every single machine would be set up for a single specific 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 exact same position in the machine as the earlier stock. The mounting was in relation to a bearing — a specific spot on the stock that was made use of as a reference point. To verify that the numerous 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 Modest Arms Market, 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 produced interchangeable firearms. This was the 1st time that geographically separate factories had produced interchangeable components. Id. at 58 Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technologies: The Challenge of Modify 212 (1977).
Simply because Hall “established the efficacy” of machine tools, he “bolstered the self-confidence amongst arms makers that a single day they would accomplish in a bigger, far more effective manner, what he had accomplished on a restricted scale. In this sense, Hall’s function represented an essential extension of the industrial revolution in America, a mechanical synthesis so various in degree as to constitute a distinction in type.” Id. at 249.
The technological advances from the federal armories had been extensively shared amongst American companies. The Springfield Armory constructed up a huge network of cooperating private entrepreneurs and insisted that advances in manufacturing tactics be extensively shared. By mid-century, what had begun as the mass production of firearms from interchangeable components had come to be globally recognized as “the American technique of manufacture”—a technique that encompassed sewing machines, and, at some point 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 since of its abundance of waterpower and for the nearby iron ore mines. Several private entrepreneurs, which includes Colt and Smith & Wesson, produced the exact same decision. The Connecticut River Valley became recognized as the Gun Valley. It was the Silicon Valley of its occasions, 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 a great deal as well high priced for ordinary citizens. The Madison-Monroe administration’s smart industrial policy, continued beneath future administrations, led the way towards the mass production of higher good quality firearms at low rates. No a single 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 achievable.
