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Monday, August 1, 2016

Declaration of War

I am getting nowhere writing and submitting law review articles about The Gunning of America, so I guess it's time to declare war, and start submitting articles to history journals.  This is an interesting problem.  You can't point out fraud in history journals (as I found out with Bellesiles); they won't even review such articles.  History journals are MUCH more progressive (hard left) than law reviews.  Instead, I am going to point the serious flaw in the Bellesiles/Haag claim that guns were not widely owned before 1848: the enormous number of gunsmiths and gun makers that are present in the records (both primary and secondary sources).  I have a spreadsheet with >3700 gunsmiths/gun makers working before 1840 in America.  I also just started searching the Library of Congress' Chronicling America, which has newspapers from 1690 to 1922, most of them text searchable.  I have already found many hitherto unknown gunsmiths.
Oh and pistols, supposedly not widely present before evil Sam Colt, appear thousands of times; often in fiction or foreign events but I can sample and figure out what percent are factual and in America.

3 comments:

  1. I've always struggled with the style of James Fennimore Cooper stories, but I don't recall "Leatherstocking" actually using a pistol.

    Well ... he wouldn't, would he?

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  2. Sending you the militia rolls for a couple of years. Thus you can point to actual refernces to Muskets, rifles, Carbines (fasiles) and braces of pistols. Key word, braces or pairs of pistols.

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  3. I wonder how many of those gunsmiths were under contract with the army or if they provided their own that wouldn't show up in the inventory either. There were certainly a great deal of guns during the Manifest Destiny period as Americans started moving west.

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