The 1855 Minnie Rifle Debate / 8 Years Later - Gettysburg

[dadams94]

Hello all you Billy Yank & Johnny Reb fans,

I just happened to see this commentary looking at old newspaper articles today debating the Minnie Rifle versus the Musket then in use in the U. S. Army. I am be wrong, but I think that would have been the old “Buck & Ball” 0.69 Springfield smoothbore. I hope the quality of the article is good enough to read as posted. The first thing that jumped out at me was that this is from the Richmond Va. Dispatch. The second thing is one only envision the decimation of the military formations that occurred on the battlefields of Sharpsburg-Antietam and Gettysburg just 7 plus years later to understand just how right the author of this article was about its lethality. And how incredibly wrong he was about if the rifle was adopted, that there would be "No danger of a war, Foreign or Domestic."

Doug

 

[Tumbledown]

Swords didn't end war. Armor didn't end war. Gunpowder didn't end war. Why should another innovation?

 

[dadams94]

JB67, That's so true! ☹

 

[ohio ramrod]

Same theory about dynamite. Nobel was so upset about being called "merchant of Death" That he left an endownent for a peace prize which is how we ended up with the Nobel Prizes.

 

[kh54]

And didn’t the inventor of the first machine gun make the same claim, that it would end war because it was so lethal? We were so young and naive then. And now.

 

[hanshi]

Yup, the only thing that ends war is peace
.

 

[TFoley]

'Only the dead have seen the end of war'.