High Capacity History

Great Video!

I hadn’t realized that these rifles were issued to the Austrian army and if you do a little reading these were Issued Infantry rifles in 1780!

That’s a decade before the drafting and ratification of the 2nd Amendment!

So not only did high capacity repeating rifles exist at the time of the 2nd Amendment, but you can imagine the founding fathers could imagine ways to improve on this system. Further for those who are stuck on the whole “Air Gun” thing, these were NOT pellet rifles, from what I read they were close to the power of a modern 230 grain .45 ACP. Not as powerful as some rifles of the time, but still nothing to sneeze at!

But yeah, we can’t allow lawful citizens to own an AR-15 because the founding fathers only knew about flintlock muskets!

This entry was posted in Freedom, Guns, Politics. Bookmark the permalink.

3 Responses to High Capacity History

  1. SJ says:

    Aside: when Lewis and Clark when on their exploration, they took an air-powered rifle of some kind with them.

    There was at least one near-fatal incident involving that air-rifle.

    I think the story is here.

    Not sure whether it was a high-capacity item like the one shown here, but high-powered air rifles were known to exist in America during the Early Republic. I don’t think they were common, but they were available. I also don’t know how available they were during the Revolution, and in the years before the drafting of the Constitution.

  2. Geodkyt says:

    Also — they were quieter than gunpowder firelocks, had no pan or muzzle flash, as well as not leaving the telltale cloud of smoke. And they fired subsequent rounds (up to close to the complete combat issue of ammo for the musket armed troops – cartridge boxes for infantry often were as small as 12 rounds, and almost NEVER exceeded 20 rounds) WAY faster.

    And they were rifles, not smoothbores firing well undersized balls (military musket balls had a lot of windage, so they could be reloaded even when the barrel was choked with fouling).

    Effectively, they were high capacity, rapid fire, flash suppressed, “silenced”, extra-long range precision sniper rifles, compared to teh flintlock military musket of the day. (Keep in mind that, despite the common myth of the American Revolution, muzzle loading rifles were a bad joke, militarily, until the invention of the Minie ball – way more expensive, very fragile in comparison, generally unable to mount a bayonet, and you got one good shot then had your position overrun by a bayonet charge before you could reload (because the rifle bullet has to be hammered down the barrel, engraving the rifling. . . this takes longer than ramming a .69 ball down a .75 smoothbore).)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *