2nd Am and lethalness

[Leslie Goldstein]

I reply to Eugene's query:
one of the points of Bellesiles' book noted in two reviews I have read
is the strange fact that muskets, the military weapon of choice, had
lousy aim and did a terrible job of killing the enemy.  the longbow was
far more effective and historians do not understand why Euro-Americans
and later Indians felt obliged to switch to muskets.  Rifles for some
reason I did not grasp clearly enough to retain were also relatively
ineffective in teh late eighteenth century.
LFG

> "Volokh, Eugene" wrote:
>
>
>         By the way, does anyone know what the true relative lethality
> is of a modern gun vs. a gun of the Revolutionary era?  It's true that
> the modern guns shoot more quickly, simply because they shoot several
> times without the need to reload, and can be reloaded quickly
> (something that was largely in place, by the way, once the revolver
> was introduced in the 1840s or so); I believe they also have a higher
> muzzle velocity.  At the same time, my guess is that gunshot wounds
> were much more likely to be fatal given the medicine of the late 1700s
> than they are today.  By way of reference, I believe that about 15% or
> so of people wounded in criminal assaults die of their wounds today --
> any sense of what the comparable statistic was likely to have been
> around the time of the Framing?
>
>