It wasn’t just that the colonists believed they had a right to defend their property, their speech, and every other inherent right: they believed they had an obligation to defend them.
We find ourselves in a situation not unlike the one confronted by our founders in the days leading up to the Battle of Bunker Hill and the beginning of the American Revolution.
While the tension between the colonists and England had been building for years, events accelerated rapidly towards violence in 1774 as the colonists began actively resisting the Intolerable Acts that Parliament had passed as retribution for the Boston Tea Party in December 1773. Among other things, the draconian laws shut down the port of Boston and suspended self-government in the colony of Massachusetts. The colonists then began forming their own provincial Congress and organizing for armed resistance to defend their rights and property from the arbitrary authoritarianism of the ruling elites in London.
Some historians have argued that the colonists fought England for economic reasons. While it was a contributing factor, that wasn’t the real reason. The real reason for the division boiled down to a question of “Who governs?” and the idea of transcendent rights and the rule of law.
The popular myth of every Colonial having a flint lock over their hearth or a musket under their bed is just that. Few at the time had even fired a gun. Most were farmers with domesticated stock and some trapped small game for consumption and the pelt trade but few were armed hunters. The elites delayed the Revolution for sometime smuggling more guns and powder to supply and train local Militias and even at the outbreak of the War Colonials were bad shots bumbling on the reload and thankful for the bayonet. It would been a shorter war in our favor if it were fought with something familiar like an axe or sickle which were the choice weapons of the few homicides of the day. Even after the Revolution few Americans had guns and in 1814 when the British attacked the capitol there were 50,000 Militia with in a two days march and many did not show up and the ones that did armed fled when fired upon by the superior trained troops and the Capitol Burned. The propaganda that we are a free people because we were so armed and such skilled Frontier marksmen like Annie Oakley is laughable. My father and grandfather both fought in wars and laughed about the training and the tactics. You close your eyes pull the trigger and piss your pants kid and hope you get out alive. Neither had guns in their homes in domestic life and were Patriots that didn’t need to.
damn you teach history? sounds like we didnt fight for independence it was given to us. the only war your father and grandfather were in was the side lines