2nd Am and lethalness

[Michael McConnell]

I have a related question for those knowledgeable about the history: Was the
term "arms" confined to guns? When I think of an "armed man," I imagine a
man with a weapon, not necessarily a gun.

Michael McConnell
University of Utah College of Law
332 South 1400 East Rm. 101
Salt Lake City, UT 84112


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Leslie Goldstein [mailto:lesl at UDEL.EDU]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2000 8:18 AM
> To: CONLAWPROF at listserv.ucla.edu
> Subject: Re: 2nd Am and lethalness
>
>
> 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?
> >
> >
>