The United States declared its independence from Great Britain 250 years ago, but the flashpoint of the Revolutionary War which led to the Declaration of Independence happened when British forces marched to seize the colonists’ arms.
Thomas Gage, serving as the British commander in Boston and royal governor of Massachusetts, acted on intelligence about stockpiled rebel arms, ammunition, artillery and provisions in Concord, Massachusetts. The goal was to disrupt preparations for armed resistance or rebellion following the Coercive Acts, which led to “the shot heard around the world” during the Battle of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775.
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Historian Larry Schweikart noted that even before the battles, British military personnel were disarming colonists in the Boston area. “After the Boston Massacre, Brit concerns escalated about armed mobs. They allowed people to leave Boston, but only without weapons,” Schweikart told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
British plans to disarms the colonists predated the March 5, 1770, incident in which British troops fired on angry Bostonians, killing five and wounding six. Attorney Stephen Halbrook observed that plans to confiscate arms went back to the initial deployment of British troops to Boston in 1768.
“Brits viewed individual firearms as a threat, but knew they couldn’t confiscate all, so they focused on the more organized forms of resistance such as cannon, powder and shot,” Schweikart said. “They never believed the ordinary citizens (not yet viewed by them as ‘militiamen’) would form that level of resistance.”
Schweikart added that the British only secured a victory during the Battle of Bunker Hill “because the Americans ran out of ammo.”
Attorney Stephen Halbrook, who has extensively written about the origins of the Second Amendment for over 50 years, told the DCNF that gun confiscation was ultimately one of the issues that led to the Declaration of Independence.
“Lexington and Concord, then Boston, were just the first steps to disarm and put the Americans under foot. The Declaration of Causes of Taking Up Arms of July 6, 1775, protested Gage’s seizure of arms from Boston’s inhabitants,” Halbrook said. “Much more conflict occurred by the time of the Declaration of Independence, which had an unwritten premise – the disarming and repression of the colonists – for what it described as the Crown’s war on the Americans: ‘But when a long train of abuses and usurpations…evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.’”
The Battles of Lexington and Concord, which also was caused in part by British forces attempting to capture resistance leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock, had the effect of convincing those in the colonies that reconciliation with the British crown was no longer a viable possibility after the disputes over taxation without representation, University of Wyoming law professor George A. Mocsary observed.
“The April 1775 arms seizures were not the whole cause of independence, but they were a decisive step that convinced Americans that reconciliation with Britain was no longer realistic,” Moscary said. “In other words, the attempt to disarm the colonists at Lexington and Concord turned a political-constitutional crisis into a war. The Declaration of Independence explained why that war had made continued allegiance impossible.”
Nine years after Americans defeated the British, the states ratified the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as part of the Bill of Rights. “A Well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” the amendment states.
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