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Yes, but the proliferation of the skillset, and availability of raw materials is related. The more materials available, and the more skilled craftsmen means that the items are likely very available for regular people to have.
Any laws against, will be harder to enforce.
We're speaking so broadly, it's almost impossible to get facts - 1300 or 1600? Britain or Saxony? Iron became cheaper as the years progressed.
What I do know from my own reading is that iron was precious enough in the 1300s that nails for shipbuilding were accounted for individually. We almost never find scrap iron from these days - it was a resource dealt with carefully. What is found are lost items.
For instance, horseshoes aren't good luck because they're horseshoes, it's because iron has properties to ward off evil. It's just that horseshoes are one of the few iron items that would get lost (and subsequently found) on the regular. A horseshoe would be the most likely found iron item for rural people.
One source did some rather uncertain 1300s math and arrived at a rough estimate of a basic sword being about the value equivalent of an acre of good farmland. That would put it out of reach for most in those days.
I'd suspect gun ownership is very dependent on rural vs urban populations. In the former, people have hunted for game since forever, and still do, and guns have been the weapon of choice for centuries although bow ownership is still common. Besides hunting for food, they're used against predators and nuisance animals. In urban/suburban areas, gun ownership is dependent on many other factors (political, criminal, self-defense etc.).
I lived in an urban area until my mid-twenties. My parents never owned a gun and I felt no compulsion to buy one.
That is until I moved to Idaho and my neighbor noticed my well trained dog and borrowed him for Chukar season on the Salmon River.
I got a free eight day float trip. My dog came back into camp tired and happy at the end of the day.
I decided it made more sense to hunt my own dog and broke down and bought my first gun.
In rural areas, you can assume that everybody is armed or has easy access to a gun. That is why rural folks are so friendly.
In the final analysis throughout history anything with a sharp edge or heavy enough to inflict blunt force trauma could be a weapon irregardless of being a military grade weapon.
In the final analysis throughout history anything with a sharp edge or heavy enough to inflict blunt force trauma could be a weapon irregardless of being a military grade weapon.
Well, yes. A competent blacksmith could convert a scythe from a farm implement to a sort of edge-on-one-side pike with relative ease. The thing is, though - if a bunch of farmers armed with that goes up against a group of landsknechte with armor, and actual swords, and practice - the farmers are done for. (Bit of rape, plunder and village burning to follow. An example must be set.)
There is a weapon called a war scythe. They were widely used in peasant uprisings, but they were better at cutting through wheat than a armed opponent.
Yes, a blacksmith could covert a scythe to a more sophisticated weapon, but its hard work and takes time. And its not a matter of just doing the smithing, he has to ensure he has the dry wood and other supplies. And even then, it would be of a metal not of the same quality as a weapon of steel made for combat.
In VA, they was no shortage of "regular" work for the blacksmith. There was only one in Williamsburg during the colonial era. In 1879, in Herndon VA there were only four. Thus, how many were around in earlier times would be an interesting figure to find out.
More recent history has the percentage of US households with a gun.
1973 47.0%
1974 46.1%
1976 46.5% Taxi Driver (1976)
1977 50.4% ----------------------------------- Max
1980 47.3% Apocalypse Now (1979)
1982 45.3%
1984 44.9%
1985 44.2%
1987 46.0%
1988 39.8%
1989 46.0%
1990 42.2%
1991 39.6% Boyz n the Hood (1991)
1993 42.0%
1994 40.6% Menace 2 Society (1993)
1996 40.1%
1998 34.8%
2000 32.4%
2002 33.5%
2004 34.7%
2006 33.1%
2008 34.0%
2010 31.1%
2012 33.1%
2014 31.0%
Those are just uneducated guesses.
I have known many scores of gun owners over the past 60 years, and none of them would ever consider answering an anonymous pollster whether or not they had guns in the house.
I don’t ever recall seeing agun in a home before I went in the Army in 1961. I got out in 67 and was a Police Officer until 1983 without seeing a gun in a home other than armed confrontations among family members
I swiss pikemen, and halberdiers were just peasants from the farms, and hillslopes. When their canton called on them, they answered as in the Battle of Montgarten against the Habsburgs. I wonder if they had their own equipment, and how they trained on short notice. Or was it like the Nat Guard, and they train once a month.
You never know when four rapscallions will come knocking and you have to finish them off with a fixed bayonet charge.
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