"Guns Have Changed. Our Gun Laws Have Not Kept Pace."

[Spider Jerusalem]

54. Not really.

Not "similar lethality", for a start; low-velocity black powder rimfire ammunition? No comparison with a modern smokeless-powder centrefire round (.223 has more than 2000fps greater muzzle velocity and more than double the energy). Prone to misfires, to jams, to fouling, clumsy reloading of single cartridges into a tube magazine. There's not really any practical comparison between a modern weapon like an AR-15 and a Henry or Spencer or an 1866 Winchester. They were a huge advance over what had come before, sure, but in terms of reload speed, rate of effective fire, and overall relative lethality they don't compare with something like a Mauser K-98 or a Lee-Enfield from just a little over 30 years later, let alone with semi-autos like the M1 or AR.

And the author of the poster is quite correct in that the most common weapon in use in the mid-1800's (during the American Civil War, certainly, and also in the earlier Crimean War, and before that the Mexican War) was a muzzle-loading musket (toward the latter part of that period, a rifled musket firing Minie-type ammunition). The Henry rifle? There were approximately 14000 or so used by the Union army during the Civil War. (Out of 2.2 million men under arms.)