We’ve recently mentioned Miles Standish, in a story about early colonist unconventional warfare. But Standish is an interesting character on several levels. He took his duties as Cmdr. of the Plymouth militia seriously; enough so, that when he perished in 1656, the weapons he had set aside would today have got him named an arsenal. We know this because his inventory of personal property, tken in conjuncyion with hi will, survives to this day.

Standish was a man of some substance for the 17th Century; his estate all told comprised over £350, a serious fortune in the time of the English Interregnum.

But we’re interested in the arms in his death inventory:

It(em:) one fowling peece 3 musketts 4 Carbines 2 smale guns one old barrell

It(em:) one sword one Cutles 3 belts

So, then, he passed away owning no less then ten firearms, of which only one was of the hunting or sporting variety; plus a spare barrel; plus two swords. All in the value of £10, 8s, 0d.

Compare that to the 4-gun “arsenal” of George Zimmerman that so alarmed the media. Or the one-gun “arsenal”  by which CBS definitively answered the question, “How small can an ‘arsenal’ be for these meretricious media morons?”

Incidentally, one of the signatories to Standish’s death inventory was his old acquaintance John Alden, originally the cooper (barrel-maker) of the Mayflower, who chose to stay in the Plymouth colony and was elected its first governor. When a colony is that small, everybody knows everybody else.

This entry was posted in The Past is Another Country on by Hognose.

About Hognose

Former Special Forces 11B2S, later 18B, weapons man. (Also served in intelligence and operations jobs in SF).

2 thoughts on “Eeek! An Arsenal!”

Stefan van der Borght

If the hysterics on the part of, er, educators (for want of a better word…or just keeping the foul language off the blog), about little boys making heinous lethal gun gestures, or even worse, biting their lunchtime snacks to resemble high capacity assault sandwiches, one might not actually need one real bang-type gun to qualify for an gasp arsenal. For instance, I have in my mini scrap-pile under my workbench a piece of metal with a hole drilled in it. Probably qualifies as a 0.047% lower for an ultramagnum blowback tactical composite automatic assault peeple shredder.

I’ve put the coffee on in case the ortoritees want to pop around and waterboard me; and the door propped open so they don’t bark the paint off their ram (it ain’t really my door in the ownership sense of the word). Mind you, they’ll probably hit the fan when they find I’ve also bitten two entire loaves of bread into various concealable silenced assassinator pistols. With spike bayonets and knuckledusters. Bad stefan, bad bad bad.

Chris

I have more Lee-Enfields than Zimmerman’s “arsenal.”