The Right to Bear Longbows (Essay‪)‬

I'm teaching two sections.of Western Civilization this semester at a local community college, along with a full-time software engineering job. As you might expect, I'm busier than a one-armed paperhanger--and so when I prepare a, lecture for my students that fits the readers of my column--I'm not too ashamed to let you share with my students! In 1347, one of the great catastrophes of human history started: the Black Death reached Italy. How? Because a Central Asian tribe, the Tatars, besieged a-town named Kaffa on the Black Sea. When bubonic plague started to kill the Tatars, they catapulted their dead over the walls--the ultimate major caliber. (Or perhaps the ultimate minor caliber, if you consider the size of the bacteria that caused all this death.) Some Italian merchants inside the city appear to have picked up the disease (or at least the rats carrying it), and returned in safety (they thought), to Italy. (1)