SAF: Responses Refuting Bellesiles Claims

SAF has put together a good web page of responses countering Bellesile’s
claims that guns were rarely owned or used in pre-civil war America.

http://www.saf.org/pub/rkba/general/GunsInEarlyAmerica.htm

Included are links to critical responses by Cramer, Malcom, Halbrook,
Lindgren and Lee, Stromberg, Suprynowicz, NRA, About.com, and even the
Washington Post. It also has some quotes from founders such as:

“If this now flourishing City, and greatly improving Colony, is destroy’d
and ruin’d, it will not be for want of Numbers of Inhabitants able to bear
Arms in
its defence. ‘Tis computed that we have at least (exclusive of Quakers)
60,000 Fighting Men, acquainted with Fire-Arms, many of them Hunters and
Marksmen, hardy and bold.”

Benjamin Franklin (1747), B.F. Papers, vol. III, p.202

“I enclose you a list of the killed, wounded, and captives of the enemy
from the commencement of hostilities at Lexington in April, 1775, until
November, 1777, since which there has been no event of any consequence…
I think that upon the whole it has been about one half the number lost by
them, in some instances more, but in others less. This difference is
ascribed to our superiority in taking aim when we fire; every soldier in our
army having been intimate with his gun from his infancy.”

Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Giovanni Fabbroni, June 8, 1778.

More at the site.
–
Jeff Chan
webmaster@r…
http://www.jeffchan.com/