continued from
fistful of teeth
Now, those groups, which, ideologically, were generally the descendants of right wing paramilitaries like the Posse Comitatus, that was popular in a good part of the American West and Midwest in the late '70's through mid-80's, and the Minutemen(No, not the boys who gave the British Army a bloody nose at Lexington and Concord back in 1775, even if that organisation named itself after their Revolutionary War predecessors), which was one of the more important, and feared, by both the general public and the American political establishment and Left in the 1960's, and sought, by organising themselves into militias, to both protest the Brady Act, which placed a ban on certain types of self-loading(generally known as automatic or semi-automatic weapons, which is kind of a misnomer)handguns and rifles, back in the late '80's, and, if need be, to both get around that act, and to move against any projected government attempt to seize whatever weapons their members had.
All that said, the militia movement in the US began fading out, after a few years of brouhaha about their existence and beliefs, in the late '90's, and, after 9/11, have been keeping a very low profile for the most part.
Either way, the common definition of the word militia in this country has changed considerably from how the Founding Fathers' generation, and many generations after them, would have understood the term.
As for gun possession, well, back in the early Republican(meaning the American Republic and not the political party, folks)period of US history, the sorts of firearms then available would have been single-shot, flintlock muskets or pistols, or single-shot rifles or shotguns, that used loose gunpowder, wadding and shot for ammunition, and that would have taken probably around a minute or so for a reasonably well-trained user to load, aim and fire. Muskets generally tended to effective at no more than about fifty to a hundred yards, while rifles, such as the famous Kentucky Rifle, could probably go up to about two to four times the distance a musket could.
Now, without getting into a loooonnngg dissertation on firearms technology and its history, which I wouldn't even know that much about anyhow, by the 1870's, there were pistol revolvers, like the famous Colt 1873 "Peacemaker", pump-action rifles and shotguns, like the Winchester '73, where you'd just load in a rifle bullet or shot, pump the lever or handle either below the weapon or below its barrel, aim, pull the trigger, and, Presto!!!, one or more dead sons-of-bitches.
Breech-loading rifles and pistols had also been developed by that time, and those meant that, by being able for a shooter to load and aim a pre-made cartridge or bullet into the gun's breech, which is a Helluva lot closer to him or her than the muzzle, or end, of a muzzle-loading musket, rifle or pistol, would be, one could easily and more safely load in more ammo, and throw off more shots at a given target or targets than ever before.
Then, with other innovations like the magazine-loading bolt-action rifle, the self-loading, or automatic, pistol, the machine-gun and sub-machine gun, the fully-automatic rifle, assault rifle, and greater ammo magazine loading and storage capacities, combined with smaller, more easily managed and operated weapons, whether handguns or long guns, weapons technology just exploded from the 1880's 'til the present day onwards, and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.
With each of these innovations, came an even greater killing and other destructive capability than had existed before.
Hence, a good deal of the problem with the social effects of having that kind of weaponry around.
Whether school shooters or mass murderers in the US and other parts of the developed world, or child soldiers, private armies and terrorists in other parts of the world, it's now far easier to train, learn, and use even a relatively simple assault weapon like the various makes and models of the AK 47 or M16, for individuals and groups than ever before, and, because of the large number of weapons of various sorts making their way around the globe than ever before, they're also generally easier and cheaper to get than at any time in history prior to the late 19th and 20th Centuries.
This means that it no longer takes as many people, if sufficiently equipped and trained, to potentially devastate a given area of a locality as it might have even, say, 50 years ago.
Mind you, street gangs, militias of various ideological persuasions and the like in the developed world have yet to get their hands on grenade launchers, shoulder-mounted rocket launchers, mortars, and heavier grades of artillery, and Thank God for that, or otherwise, some parts of American inner cities and European suburbs would look like Beirut at the height of the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-90.
But, as in Lebanon of the period mentioned above, or in Yugoslavia of the 1990's, some such groups in other parts of the world have and did, with disastrous results for those societies.
Do I think that street gangs, etc, will get their hands on such weapons? Probably not for some time to come, as they aren't manufactured in quite the mass quantities as handguns, shotguns and rifles are.
But, even without those heavier weapons, an individual or a determined group can do an incredible amount of damage with the kinds of modern infantry weapons I've described above.
Thus far, in the US, we've been relatively luckier than many around the world, in that we've not had the kinds of genuinely determined and able political and social armed groups, like, say, the Lebanese Phalangist Party or Hizbollah, that could capably make urban warfare, or just plain classic warfare, on a large enough scale and for a long enough time to really bugger things up here.
Yeah, there have been groups like the Minutemen, the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Posse Comitatus that have been potential threats.
But, whether because of Federal, state and local law enforcement agencies(sometimes illegal and unConstitutional efforts like the old FBI Cointelpro programme)operations, as in the cases of the Minutemen and Black Panthers, or a combination of similar law enforcement efforts combined with sheer ineptitude on the targeted groups' parts, as in the Weathermen's and SLA's cases, those groups were eventually whittled down to size and quashed.
Instead, urban, suburban and rural discontent and anger has generally manifested itself in the US through riots, one-on-one, or group-on-one assaults, murders and other crimes, and occasional out-breaks of mass murders and school shootings, as well as gang violence.
