What I’ve always thought would make an interesting alternative-history story would be if the Native Americans (or aboriginals in any place really) had something akin to a modern compound bow.
I’ve been shooting bows since I was six. I’ve also fired matchlock smoothbore guns. The matchlock is more powerful, but less accurate, slower to fire, noisy, it takes some setup before you can fire it the first time. Compound bows are crazy accurate in the right hands, and some can launch an arrow weighing 40-50 grams at 100 meters per second. Add a sharpened tip and it will penetrate a lot of armor, too.
Black Panthers in California were famously armed, until Ronald Reagan signed the NRA-supported “Mulford Act” which prohibited them from carrying loaded weapons.
There were similar racial motivation behind the wave of legal prohibitions on concealment in the late 19th century. The thinking was that only “criminals” needed to hide the fact that they were armed; “honest” and “law abiding” people had no need to hide their weapons from other “honest” and “law abiding” citizens or the police. The supporters of these laws didn’t make it a secret that their intentions were to disarm former slaves, who would certainly draw unwanted attention from racists if they attempted to carry openly as the law allowed.
Before the emancipation proclamation, the only restrictions on guns were based on criminal conviction and race, specifically, the disarmament of “Negroes” and “Indians”.
If only the Black Panthers and Native Americans had been armed…
What I’ve always thought would make an interesting alternative-history story would be if the Native Americans (or aboriginals in any place really) had something akin to a modern compound bow.
I’ve been shooting bows since I was six. I’ve also fired matchlock smoothbore guns. The matchlock is more powerful, but less accurate, slower to fire, noisy, it takes some setup before you can fire it the first time. Compound bows are crazy accurate in the right hands, and some can launch an arrow weighing 40-50 grams at 100 meters per second. Add a sharpened tip and it will penetrate a lot of armor, too.
Black Panthers in California were famously armed, until Ronald Reagan signed the NRA-supported “Mulford Act” which prohibited them from carrying loaded weapons.
There were similar racial motivation behind the wave of legal prohibitions on concealment in the late 19th century. The thinking was that only “criminals” needed to hide the fact that they were armed; “honest” and “law abiding” people had no need to hide their weapons from other “honest” and “law abiding” citizens or the police. The supporters of these laws didn’t make it a secret that their intentions were to disarm former slaves, who would certainly draw unwanted attention from racists if they attempted to carry openly as the law allowed.
Before the emancipation proclamation, the only restrictions on guns were based on criminal conviction and race, specifically, the disarmament of “Negroes” and “Indians”.