Gun Indemnity: Fill & Download for Free

The British Army bought twelve in 1869. The Royal Navy adopted it in 1871.It was in November 1862 that Richard Jordan Gatling invented the gun that bears his name, although on the patent he referred to it as the 'Revolving Battery Gun'.He demonstrated it to the US Army, but they were unimpressed and turned him down. A few individuals showed more interest: in particular, in 1864 General Benjamin Butler of the Army of the James paid $12,000 of his own money to acquire twelve Gatling guns. Some ship commanders in the US Navy also acquired the weapons.The problem with the early Gatling gun was that the stationary firing mechanism and the revolving barrels did not always line up properly, leading to a high risk of misfire and gas leakage. Gatling tried to solve the problem by using a tapering barrel, wider at the breech than the muzzle, but this meant that the bullets often did not engage with the rifling, and thus were highly inaccurate.A group of official observers from the British Army arrived in the United States in 1862, and they were present at a demonstration of the gun. Like the US Army authorities, their opinion was negative:We saw some practice at 250 yards range against a target with this gun, which was very bad ... It fired with great rapidity, but soon got out of order, and would not be likely to remain long in proper trim. ... It might be useful in the defence of a narrow passage or bridge, but it is questionable whether it would be of any great practical utility in the open field of battle.Gatling continued to work on his invention, however, and in May 1865 — after the American Civil War had ended — he patented a new and much-improved version which solved most of the problems with his original design. This version now included a firing chamber incorporated into each of the rotating barrels, instead of having a single stationary one which was supposed to match with each barrel as it went around.The improved weapon was finally given official approval by the US Army in August 1866. They ordered a hundred, and Gatling signed a contract with the Colt company of Hartford, Connecticut to manufacture them. (Colt would later purchase the patent from him.)Now that the weapon was a success, Gatling travelled to Europe to see if he could interest foreign buyers in it as well. Russia was one of the first adopters: they ordered 400 of them in 1871.The British Army decided to purchase twelve Gatling guns in 1869. However, in the following year the arms manufacturer W G Armstrong & Co saw the opportunity in this new weapon, and so in 1870 they obtained a licence from Gatling to produce his gun themselves in the UK.The Armstrong version of the gun differed in several ways from Gatling's original. It had ten barrels rather than six, and by 1871 it had been redesigned to use a .45 cartridge rather than the .50 used by the American version. A larger .65 calibre version was also produced.The Royal Navy officially adopted the Gatling gun in 1871. They were fitted in the upperworks of ships for close-range defence, and could also be used by landing parties and marine detachments.Gatling gun manufactured by W G Armstrong and Co; the brass casing is because this gun was for naval use. This particular gun was made in 1884 and is stamped “No. 4136”The first combat use of the Gatling gun by Britain was during the Third Ashanti War of 1873, when two of them were taken to West Africa.In 1872 the Netherlands sold their African colony of Elmina to Britain for 47 thousand Dutch guilders. This disturbed the balance of power in the region, since the Dutch had been allied to the powerful, warlike and slave-trading Ashanti Kingdom inland, while the coastal Fante tribes had allied themselves with Britain since the 1820s for protection against the Ashanti. King Kofi Karikari of the Ashanti saw the Dutch departure from the region as a threat to his influence that would make the British and their Fante allies more powerful; so to counter that in June 1873 he sent his army to occupy Elmina.In British eyes, that was an act of aggression against their newly-acquired possession; so they organised an army to recapture the port and 'punish' the Ashanti to deter them from further attacks. General Garnet Wolseley was sent with 2,500 British and West Indian troops, who arrived in late 1873 and were reinforced by two regiments of their Fante allies. Two Gatling guns accompanied the expedition, under the command of a captain of the Royal Artillery named Arthur Rait.Rait demonstrated the guns to the local inhabitants at Cape Coast Castle, to great enthusiasm. However, the heavy 180 kg guns on their wheeled carriages proved impractical for jungle warfare.The Ashanti capital of Kumasi was 160 miles (260 km) inland, through dense rainforest, and the Ashanti were confident that the British would be unable to fight them in such terrain. General Wolseley resolved to build a road right through the jungle for his troops to march down, defended Roman-style by a fortified camp every ten miles. A prefabricated bridge was even brought from England to cross the 60-metre wide River Prah.The two Gatling guns set off down this road as it was under construction. However, one only got 16 miles from the coast before its mechanism seized up, and it was taken back to base. The second gun was brought to the banks of the River Prah, where it was set up in a fortified redoubt to defend the bridge.This gun was never fired in anger, because the Ashanti did not, as Wolseley had feared, attempt to capture or destroy the bridge. However, on 4 January 1874 a delegation of envoys from the Ashanti arrived at the Prah to negotiate with the British. As a demonstration of strength, the British fired off a full drum of ammunition from the Gatling into the river. This so impressed the Ashanti envoys that reportedly, one of them later committed suicide in the belief that it was 'hopeless to fight against such weapons'.On 29 January General Wolseley decided that the road had been completed to the stage that the main British army could advance down it. On 31 January a battle was fought at Amoaful, with soldiers of the Rifle Brigade and the 42nd 'Black Watch' Highland regiment defeating the Ashanti. On 4 February the advancing column reached Kumasi, which had been abandoned by its defenders. However, the Gatling gun did not accompany this attack; it was left behind on the Prah to defend the river crossing.Soldiers of the 42nd Highlanders in action: picture from the Illustrated London News 1874.A few months later the Ashanti surrendered. The peace treaty required them to give up human sacrifice, allow free trade with the British and allied settlements on the coast, and pay an indemnity in gold.The first time a Gatling gun was fired in anger by British forces was in 1877, during the naval battle of Pacocha on 29 May 1877.This was a bizarre conflict even by 19th century standards. In Peru in May 1877 a politician, Nicolás de Piérola, attempted to seize power in a coup d'état. He failed, but some of his supporters, led by a retired Navy captain, managed to seize control of the Peruvian navy's largest warship, the ironclad monitor Huáscar. Over the next few weeks, even after the coup was defeated, the Huáscar sailed up and down the coast attacking commercial shipping heading in and out of Peru's ports.The official Peruvian government denounced the crew of the Huáscar as pirates, and sent the rest of its fleet to recapture the ironclad. However, this proved difficult as the Huáscar was probably the strangest pirate ship ever to sail the seas: an 1,870-ton turret ironclad with 114mm thick armour, armed with two 10" guns in a revolving turret and an array of smaller guns.When the Peruvian navy proved unsuccessful in halting or capturing the Huáscar, the British Royal Navy stepped in. Spurred to action by the fact that the rogue ironclad had attacked four British merchant ships during its rampage, Rear-Admiral de Horsey of the British Pacific Squadron sent the frigate HMS Shah and corvette HMS Amethyst to intercept the Huáscar, with orders to call on its crew to surrender, and if they did not, to open fire.The combat was uneven since neither British warship was armoured, though Shah was larger than Huáscar at 4,210 tons, while Amethyst was smaller at 1,405 tons. Nevertheless, the British called on the Peruvian rebel battleship to surender, and when they refused, the battle began.For three hours in the afternoon of 29 May the ironclad and the two British ships exchanged fire. However, of the 60 or so hits the British scored on the Huáscar with their main armament, none of them were able to penetrate the ironclad's thick armour. Conversely, the highly inaccurate gunfire of the rebels did nothing but superficial damage to the Royal Navy warships, despite the fact that their lack of armour would have rendered them vulnerable to a solid hit. The fighting ended inconclusively when darkness fell.The Battle of Pacocha was, however, remarkable for two 'firsts'. It was the first time British forces fired a Gatling gun against an enemy. HMS Shah mounted one in her fighting top (a platform mounted up on the mast), and this scored multiple hits on the Huáscar's funnel. According to an eyewitness, the funnel was "riddled with bullets from the Gatling gun".Secondly, the battle was the first time ever that a torpedo was fired at an enemy ship. Earlier so-called 'torpedoes' had merely been bombs mounted on the end of a long pole, but HMS Shah carried four of the new Whitehead 'locomotive torpedoes'. One of these was fired at the Huáscar during the battle, but it missed the target. The following night the British tried to send two small boats into the harbour towing two more of the torpedoes, but they discovered that the rebel ironclad had slipped away and escaped soon after darkness fell.The following day the crew of the Huáscar surrendered to the Peruvian authorities, and the conflict was over. The rebels did not face severe punishment: their actions had caught the imagination of the public in Peru. In Britain Admiral de Horsey faced criticism from some quarters for over-reacting and risking an international incident, though he faced no formal censure.Huáscar went on to be captured by the Chilean navy some years later, and is preserved as a museum ship in Chile. The white drum-like sructure just behind the foremast is the turret.

Well, China didn't want opium. The Brit and the French shoved it down her throat with guns pointing at her head. First Opium War. Second Opium War. The indemnities bankrupted the country. The U.S. and Russia got a nice slice of the pie as well. What's so complicated about that?So we were drug-runners. We are still running drugs to this day. Allegations of CIA drug trafficking. The war in Afghanistan certainly produced a bumper crop of drugs. Drug Trafficking in Afghanistan.What is interesting is that China did not preach hate against the Western Nations. Instead, it came to the objective conclusion that a strong nation can force unpleasant things upon a weaker nation through armed forces, regardless of the morality of the issue. So the way going forward is not to pin blames on past aggressors, but grow stronger itself. That's actually a remarkably non-confrontational, forward-looking attitude.

Note: Updated to add news coverage of a non-police concealed carrier stopping a mass shooting at a back-to-school fair held for schoolchildren in Florida.“Why do so many people who have never been in a gunfight in their lives think they can “take down” an active shooter?”Because we can (and we have) if the circumstances are right. It happens more often than the national media report, because stopping a massacre is not news. There are no brutalized children and wailing parents to put on the air, so the networks, cables, and national newspapers don’t bother. That means most of the nation never sees what concealed carriers CAN do and HAVE done when in the right place at the right time with the right psycho-stopping tool.But: The inherent chaos of a mass shooting makes circumstances hardly ever right for us to to act knowingly and decisively in most mass shootings. So contrary to the OP’s assumption, armed citizens do not generally stop mass shootings. We do sometimes, and that’s great, but mostly we don’t. Here’s why:—We’re not there most of the time. For all the melodramatic media hype of “gun-drunk America,” most citizens do not carry guns in public. A 2016 study saidAmerica has 15 million concealed carry licensees and eight million Americans who carry a gun daily. In a population of 300 million, that’s miniscule. Armed citizens are simply not in place 99 percent of the time.—Nor do we routinely hang out at the places where mass shootings are likely to occur. For instance, I don’t have kids in school, so I never, ever, visit schools. People with kids in school might drop them off and pick them up, but otherwise are off Adulting for the day while the kids study and learn. So the odds that I or another armed citizen will be physically present at the place and time of a random mass shooting are slim to none.—Even if we ARE there, the chaos of an active shooting may prevent us from knowing where the shooter is. If we do spot him, we may not be able to get to him. (“Him” because it’s almost always a male.” Or we may be so outgunned that trying would be suicide, so we leave or hide.—Many places are “gun-free zones,” making it illegal to carry our guns there. Astonishingly (sarcasm), that’s also where many of our slaughters take place: schools, bars, places of worship. Psychos know most of those places ban firearms and they plan accordingly. Mass killers do not shoot up police stations much.—You can shoot an active killer without retreating first only if your state has a law called “Stand Your Ground.” It means simply that in a violent attack, you are not required to seek safety before responding with lethal force. SYG gets a bad rap because of the Trayvon Martin case, but here’s the alternative: In states without SYG laws, if a man standing in front of you pulls a machine gun from his duffel bag and opens fire on a crowd of children, you could not legally pull out your pistol and shoot him in the back of the head to save those kids’ lives if you have the means to flee to safety. (i.e., You are behind him, he’s shooting straight ahead, and you’re leaning against the crash bar of a steel exit door.) You could end the spree with a single shot. But if you do, you could legally be charged because you killed an active shooter before running for safety. How dare you!!!! It’s highly unlikely you’d be charged in that particular circumstance—any prosecutor who put you in jail for saving children from a madman would be impeached—but in rabidly anti-gun states like New York, New Jersey, and California, I could easily see charges filed in cases involving less-sympathetic victims.—Concealed carry was designed for personal self-defense against regular criminals: muggers, thugs, rapists, berserkers, robbers, perverts, killers, kidnappers, and others who want our money, our bodies, or our lives. But most aren’t psychopaths like mass shooters: they want to live to crime again. So when they see our guns, they generally take off to look for unarmed prey. In that role, we have been wildly successful, with hundreds of thousands of attacks stopped annually, often without shots fired and nobody hurt. I have done it myself against a trio of muggers—they broke off their attack and I didn’t have to pull my gun, let alone shoot. Mission accomplished.—Conversely, mass shootings are performed by psychopaths who are willing to die as long as they can take everyone with them. That makes them incredibly hard to take down. (Hey, if it were easy to stop them, we wouldn’t have mass shootings, right?) But even trained cops have a tough time preventing five or ten or twenty murders, and for the same reason as armed citizens: They aren’t there. It takes minutes or hours (depending on urban or rural) for police to show up at mass shooting in progress. But at least when they arrive, they bring radios, helmets, body armor, rifles, helicopters, armored vehicles, assault rifles, flash-bang grenades, and SWAT. Concealed carriers don’t have those advantages. We just have us and a handgun and courage. Maybe a pocket knife.—That said, armed citizens have “taken down” active mass shooters, and we’ve done it more than once. Many armed citizens are willing to put their life on the line to save others. But it’s critical to emphasize that most Americans do not walk around armed. A 2016 study shows that in a population of 300 million Americans, only 8 million carry a gun daily, and only 15 million have concealed carry permits. Let’s be generous and say 10 million people carry a gun daily and 20 million have permits, to account for the past two years of gun sales and for natural undercounting in government surveys. That’s still just 10 million daily gun carriers in a population of 300 million. Three percent of citizens carry a gun daily and 97 percent do not. that’s very long odds one of them will be where they need to be to stop a mass shooting.—Did I mention America is also a ginormous country? Like, bigger than most nations on Earth? Those presumed 10 million daily gun carriers don’t stretch very far in a single nation the size of Europe. (Yeah, I checked: the United States and Europe are virtually the same size geographically.)—So given low numbers of gun carriers and high square miles of turf, the mathematical odds of, say, me being in precisely the right place the moment a psychopath is aiming a rifle at a recess yard of first-graders and I am able to shoot him (without missing!) before he kills a little angel is a trillion-to-one.—Which makes the antigun jerks who sneer, “How come there wasn’t a good guy there to stop the bad guy THAT time, huh, huh?” blithering idiots with IQs that match his or her number of toes.—In a life-or-death emergency, lots of things can interfere with the steely determination and sublime marksmanship we exhibit while practicing. Shooting ranges are orderly and paper targets don’t shoot back. Mass shootings are chaotic and bloody madhouses of screaming, stampeding, puking, dying people. The D-Day opening of “Saving Private Ryan” will give you a taste of the insanity of bullets flying all around you. If armed citizens can’t see the shooter, we can’t shoot back. If we do see the shooter, we can’t fire if there’s any chance of accidentally hitting a third party. (An armed civilian was present at Rep. Gabby Giffords’ shooting in Arizona. He had a chance to shoot her attacker. He held fire because he might have hit an innocent bystander.) If we pull our guns, we might be wrongly considered The Killer and shot. Recently in the south suburbs of Chicago, a private security officer was shot to death by a local cop responding to a call of shots fired in a bar. The cop arrived, saw a man aiming a gun at another man (the guard was holding the mass shooter at gunpoint), and opened fire before determining if the guard was a good guy or bad guy. The guard died.—If we do fire, we might miss. If we do hit the gunman, he might be wearing body armor, so we have to go for a head shot, which is virtually impossible at long range unless you’ve trained for years in the science and art of hitting small, moving objects with bullets. Psychopathic gunmen can absorb more than one bullet—in some cases, dozens—before dropping. When feces hits fan—and mass shootings are the very definition of that—your body reacts as if Tasered. Adrenaline dumps into your bloodstream, making your extremities (including the all-important gun hands and trigger finger) stiff and shaky. Fine motor skills—i.e., dexterity—evaporate, and your eyesight narrows to tunnel vision. Your perception of time and distance changes. Hearing closes down. All that makes the accurate firing of any gun, but especially a handgun, harder than it looks in the movies. Far far far far FAR harder.—If by some miracle we are on scene, in position, see the gunman, aim, fire, and kill him to save a bunch of people from dying . . . we can still be handcuffed and held for investigation. Even if we did everything by the book, we can still be charged by a cheap prosecutor looking for cheap headlines. We can be sued by the family of the dead killer. We can be slimed by the gun-hating media. We can eventually triumph over all of that . . . yet still be bankrupted by the legal bills. We are not cops, so we don’t have sovereignty indemnity against personal lawsuits. No police department pays our lawyer bills. We are on our own after saving our asses from a lead-spitting monster, and maybe saving yours too.—And yet, with all that downside, many of us will rise to the occasion and shoot the mass shooter till he stops his attack, if we can, because saving innocent lives is legally, ethically, and morally the right thing to do. Yeah. We will. We have. No brag, just fact. Here is a link to just one of many such saves. It was a back-to-school fair at a public park in Florida. A man showed up with a gun and opened fire into the crowd of children there to get backpacks, notebooks, paper, and encouragement. An armed civilian immediately shot him dead, preventing a slaughter. If the gunman had gone unchallenged he would have killed dozens. Since an armed citizen stopped him, he killed nobody. The former would have led all national television news reports and blanketed the front page of the New York Times. The latter “no slaughter = no news” was lucky to make “Florida Today” and other regional news operations. So the general public rarely sees the good an armed citizen can actually do when in the right place at the right time. The link:Concealed Carry Holder Stops Shooter At School Event, Saves Kids—But all that said, some of us will not open fire. Some because we can’t, for reasons outlined above. Some will run away, some will hide, some will panic and freeze. It’s not shameful: self preservation is more powerful than sex, water, food, and love. It is really hard to overcome the urge to flee until you’re safe. Yes, armed citizens have the legal right to employ deadly force—i.e., shoot the virus until he stops attacking—if we or other people are in imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury. (“Kill or be killed.”) But we may, or may not, decide to exercise that legal right, depending on how willing we are to chance being killed or crippled by a psychopathic gunman, how willing we are to endure the legal aftermath, if we personally know anyone in the crowd, and whether we decide it better to run away and let the police handle this mess. Yeah, we carry guns, but we also have families and our own lives to consider. It’s not an easy call to make, despite the Song of the Armchair Hero. You know the singer. He’s the steely-eyed hombre who brags how tough he’d a been if he’d just been there. He’d a by-God shot Johnny Jihad to hell and smithereens, then drink rum and Cokes with the purty girls he just saved with his Magnum, why yes he would, and the dead gonads’ buddies over in Berserkistan would be cursing his manly name . . .Sure, Hoss. Of course you woulda saved the day. I bow to your La-Z-Boy-honed skillz. But the bottom line back in the real world is this . . .—Concealed carriers are human, not Robocops. We will save the lives of ourselves and our loved ones, and maybe—but not necessarily—yours. You should assume you are on your own in a mass shooting, and hope the cops get there in time to save the day. If we’re there and we can help you, we will. But you decided not to arm yourself against the predators of the world. Your choice, but also your consequence.