Minutemen

This one we're talking about really two things.

And it's the Liberty Bell and then the Minuteman.

And the Minuteman statue or what the Minuteman represents.

But the Liberty Bell is a fun one.

I think everybody knows the Liberty Bell.

good one.

All right.

So also we want to talk about the Minuteman or Minutemen or just the symbol of Minutemen.

Uh, again, it's fictional, so I, again, it's one of those larger themes that I bring into the book deliberately.

I think today, especially in light of some recent debates with gun rights, et cetera, Second Amendment advocates often circle back to our militias, the Minutemen, who were armed and ready to fight for American freedom.

But there were also loyalist militias, colonists loyal to the king, who took up arms to fight for their cause.

We're not talking about the Redcoats or British military.

And four separate touch holes, so yeah, you'd have to.

So let me ask you this one, because I've always said, and I don't know if I want to make sure that what I'm saying is right, that the American Revolution We had an advantage because of the Kentucky long rifle that Americans, woodsmen, Minutemen, had guns that had rifling in the barrel.

And you don't know this if you don't know guns.

Rifling looks like a barbershop pole.

And so he thought, well, if we allow these militia to be armed, armed as they are then this could be a civil insurrection so he decided to seize all the gunpowder if you don't have gunpowder then your your rifles your muskets don't do very much and so he uh sent the army to the royal magazines in a suburb of Boston and marched them.

And the Sons of Liberty had good intelligence also, and they got wind of this, and they called out the Minutemen across New England.

And dozens of thousands of militias started to march on Boston within 12 or 24 hours.

because the report was the soldiers are seizing the gunpowder.

It was defused, to use a term and make a pun.

In the end, the Minutemen were called off.

There was not an exchange of violence.

Change of fire.

And so, in fact, the shire at the end of the novel has left that status of a group of people placidly living in anarchy being descended on the, defended from the outside and has become newly constituted as people who will zealously defend their anarchic life when called upon without ever creating a standing army.

And it's basically the Robin Hood or Minutemen vision.

The

Minutemen would be the

one,

obviously, taking your musket down from the fireplace and then, you know, going down, which is