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Category: All About Guns
Photos by Philip Schreier.
Though its active official service life was less than a half-dozen years, Britain’s Pattern 1851 “Minié” rifle musket was an important step in the evolution of military longarms. It was the first gun of its type to be general-issue in an important conflict.
The gun’s unofficial “Minié” honorific, while technically correct, rather slights the work of many other men responsible for it coming into being. These include Capt. John Norton, William Greener, Capt. Henri-Gustave Delvigne, Col. Louis-Étienne de Thouvenin and Capt. Francoise Tamisier, whose combined influence/work led up to the hollow-based cylindro-conical bullet into which Capt. Charles Claude-Étienne Minié added his critical element, turning an acceptable concept into a military miracle.
By the late 1700s, governments began recognizing the value of arming all troops with rifles—a laudable aim hampered by loading techniques that were simply not fast enough for general service use. Serious efforts to simplify things beginning in the early 1820s had, by the mid-to-late 1840s, resulted in a bullet/system combining the efforts of Delvigne, Thouvenin and Tamisier in which a slightly sub-caliber, conical, hollow-base bullet was loaded easily and then expanded into the rifling by several stout raps of a ramrod as it rested upon a metal pillar (tige) within the barrel chamber.
The arrangement provided considerably better range and accuracy than that seen with smoothbore muskets firing round balls, however, the tige was prone to deformation, and the gun’s bore was difficult to clean and maintain.
Captain Minié surveyed the situation and came up with a clever solution—he devised a bullet with an integral domed iron cup set into its base that would take the place of the tige. When the rifle was fired, the explosion forced the cup into the tapering bullet cavity, expanding it into the grooves.
Minié’s system worked and worked well. Results were so impressive that the British Board of Ordnance began its own trials. Obligingly supplied with samples from the French, the commission was free to experiment, the principal precondition for adoption being that the new bullet diameter and cartridge weight be the same as that of the current musket ball round.
The arm that finally appeared in 1851, after a relatively short developmental period, was a .702-cal. rifle musket that, though possessed of a rifled barrel, was almost a ringer for the issue Pattern 1842 smoothbore, its main external difference being an adjustable-ladder rear sight graduated to 900 yards. The rifle musket’s slightly tapered, smooth, 0.702″, hollow-base bullet weighed 680 grains and incorporated a cavity fitted with the Minié hemispherical iron expander plug.
After some tweaking and minor adjustments to the rifle and bullet, component production of the new gun was undertaken by contractors, and the parts were assembled at the Tower Armouries. Officially termed the “Pattern 1851 Rifle-Musket,” the new piece was universally called the “Minié Rifle” by users, the press and admirers.
Appearing in time to be used by British infantry during the Crimean War (1854-56), all but 1,000 of the 35,000 arms made between 1852 and 1855 saw issue. As good as it was, the Pattern 1851 ended up being little more than a stopgap arm because concurrent “smallbore” experiments resulted in its replacement with the superb Pattern 1853 Enfield, examples of which were actually made in time to see use in Crimea.
Following the conflict, Pattern 51s were withdrawn and put into stores and eventually sold as surplus to other militaries (some were employed in the American Civil War) and to commercial concerns. Today, a good-quality, unaltered Pattern 51 is a scarce item. The one appearing here, which was issued to the 77th (East Middlesex) Regiment of Foot and undoubtedly saw Crimean use, remains in good, serviceable condition. Accordingly, it is valued at $4,500.
Gun: Pattern 1851 Rifle Musket
Manufacturer: Tower Royal Armouries
Caliber: .702
Manufactured: 1852
Condition: NRA Very Good (Antique Gun Standards)
Value: $4,500
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This great Nation & Its People
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Comparing two different M1 Garands
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Colt’s Path to the 1911
There is no practical difference between these two firearms. The top weapon is registered under the National Firearms Act. The bottom is an uncontrolled handgun.
Drunk people should never get behind the wheel of a car. Likewise, angry folks should eschew keyboards. Spock, not Kirk, should forever be your role model. The most successful people control their emotions. However, I am going to willingly violate that axiom today. As I settle in behind my trusty MAC, I am absolutely livid.
This is the reason short-barreled weapons need to be removed from the purview of the NFA. The Pistol Stabilizing Brace is on top alongside a conventional M4 buttstock.
Quiet Power
The Senate Parliamentarian is an unelected woman named Elizabeth MacDonough. Ms. MacDonough is 59 years old and a breast cancer survivor. She earned her JD degree from Vermont Law School in 1998. She took her current job in 2012. She was appointed by Nevada Democrat Harry Reid.
The Parliamentarian’s job is to interpret the Standing Rules of the United States Senate. What makes her so important is that the parliamentarian has sole discretion concerning what can and cannot be done under the Senate’s budget reconciliation process. The details of this process stem from something called the Byrd Rule. Subjecting budget legislation to this scrutiny is colloquially referred to as the Byrd Bath.
All the chaos stems from the fact that Left and Right cannot agree on anything at all these days. In the past, everybody acknowledged that Mom, apple pie, and America were awesome.
The philosophical differences between the two political poles were nuanced at best. Nowadays, however, thanks to such hot-button topics as abortion, gun control, trans surgeries for children, and the like, the two sides might as well come from two different planets. That’s fine, except that nothing gets through the US Senate without a 60-vote majority.
That used to be two-thirds. The Founding Fathers, bless their hearts, knew that human beings were rambunctious, emotional, and chaotic. That’s the US House of Representatives in a sentence. Stuff passes the House via a simple majority.
The requirement for a two-thirds majority in the Senate was a safety valve of sorts to ensure that the tyranny of the majority did not unfairly target the little guy. However, the unintended consequence nowadays is that nothing ever gets done. You couldn’t get sixty senators to agree that the sky was blue or that puppies were cute.
The one gleaming exception is the budget reconciliation process. Knowing that nothing as partisan as the budget would ever pass the 60-vote threshold, budget bills move out of the Senate via simple majority.
However, not before Ms. Elizabeth MacDonough gives her seal of approval. Ms. MacDonough, with the stroke of a keyboard, can edit out anything she feels does not comport with the budget process. This is designed to keep our idiot lawmakers from levying a transfer tax on spitballs or replacing the Bald Eagle with the Archaeopteryx as the national bird, all by falsely claiming it was budget-related.
Possession of the bottom semiautomatic rifle is uncontrolled in most places in the US. If unregistered, the top gun will get you ten years in federal prison. That seems pretty stupid to me.
The rifle on top has a 14.5-inch barrel and therefore currently demands registration with the government and a $200 tribute. Everything else is cash and carry.
Erasure Legislation?
Now fast forward to the Year of Our Lord 2025, and Donald J. Trump, the most disruptive person in all of human history, takes his mail at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Miraculously, language got inserted into the 2025 Budget Reconciliation Act (the Big Beautiful Bill) that rights a grievous historical wrong, removing both sound suppressors and short-barreled weapons from the purview of the NFA. This was going to be American history’s first meaningful pushback against the inexorable juggernaut that has been a century’s worth of gun control. And Elizabeth MacDonough just scribbled it all out.
So, there we are. Forget that the entire issue orbits around a tax statute. That’s the only way they got it passed back in 1934. For the first time in my lifetime, both houses of Congress would have agreed to grant Americans a little bit more firearms freedom. Now that’s gone. Senator Thune and Vice President Vance have the option of either firing or overruling Ms. McDonough, but they won’t. They have bigger fish to fry. American gun owners don’t matter. We never have.
The gun on top has to be registered with the government. The shorter version on bottom does not. It never did make any sense.
Lasting Impacts
This seems a niche issue. However, Randy Weaver’s wife Vicki, his 14-year-old son Sammy, and a Federal Marshal named William Degan all died because Weaver cut the barrel on a shotgun down to 13 inches. Google Ruby Ridge siege if you’d like the details. This is a big deal.
You can walk out of an American gun shop with a handgun that will fit in your jeans pocket. However, cut the barrel on your favorite AR15 back to less than sixteen inches, and that’s a felony good for a $10,000 fine and ten years in the Big House. It’s simply asinine, and we came within one keystroke of finally making that right.
We American gun owners have lost every legislative fight we have ever waged. Every single one. The 1986 Firearms Owners Protection Act sounded great, but that was when Uncle Sam banned machineguns.
If the bill does pass in its current form, it does remove the onerous $200 transfer tax. That is no small thing, and I am sincerely grateful for the legislators who squirreled that bit of prose into the beast.
While all of the superfluous registration requirements still remain, abolishing the transfer tax will open up a fresh new market in used cans and short-barreled guns. It should also supercharge the suppressor industry as a whole. However, it should have been so much better.
I once wore the uniform and was both willing and available to die for this great nation if that was what it took. I love my country.
However, I am profoundly disappointed with my government. What was originally supposed to be of the people, by the people, and for the people simply isn’t any more. Who knows, perhaps in another fifty years we’ll have another shot at it. I will, of course, be dead by then, but at least somebody else will be the Parliamentarian.