The Second Amendment is meaningless, gun prohibitionists claim, because armed citizens cannot possibly defeat professional standing armies. Gun prohibitionists sneer at the thought of foolish citizens clad in hunter's orange charging at tanks and brandishing their "Saturday Night Specials." Yet, for freedom-loving citizens to prevail against a powerful standing army, the citizens need never defeat the army in head-to-head combat, as the history of American Revolution illustrates.

Last month, we looked at the prelude to the American Revolution. The British expected their well-trained standing army to smash the upstart Americans quickly. The Americans predicted their militias -- comprised of all the adult males in a given locality -- would speedily drive the Redcoats into the sea. The reality of the American Revolution upset both sides' expectations.

After the April 1775 American defeat at Lexington and victory at Concord, the British and Americans fought next at Breed's Hill north of Boston. The British army commander and the American militia commanders both made drastic errors. The battle was a draw.

To the Americans, a draw was the same as victory. In fact they had inflicted twice as many casualties as they suffered. What the British called the "rabble in arms" had held its own against the mighty British army.

In American memory, the draw at Breed's Hill became the glorious Battle of Bunker Hill. The official American national myth that the citizen militiaman was always superior to the professional soldier grew stronger than ever. But subsequent events deflated the self-congratulatory American myth.

The Massachusetts militia had acquitted itself well when fighting to defend its own territory. But American citizen/soldiers, being reluctant to follow the discipline typical of professional European soldiers, performed poorly on extended campaigns.

As in the French and Indian War, the Americans declined to go far from home for very long. Even Americans who formally enlisted in the national Continental Army resisted signing up for more than a year. At the end of their year, they would leave for home and farm in mid-campaign.

The inadequacy of the Continental Army was made painfully clear in the first winter of the war, when an American force headed north to seize Canada. The late 1775 expedition was a disaster. In January 1776, half the American enlistments were set to expire. The American generals had to launch a desperate -- and futile -- attack on Montreal on December 30 during a blizzard before their "army" melted away.

A European professional army would have succeeded where the Americans failed, because the European soldiers, terrified of their commanders, would not have dared to walk away from the army in the middle of a campaign.

Because Americans insisted on returning to their farms at least once a year, or never wanting to stray far in the first place, George Washington and the Continental Congress never had a Continental Army as large as they wanted. Ironically, the American refusal to enlist in long-term service in their national army was to the better. Local militia service enabled men to fight the British sometimes, and keep the economy going the rest of the time.

Furthermore, the British could move faster than the Continental Army since the British controlled the waters and could travel by sea. Accordingly, the British could usually choose when to fight the Continental Army, and when to avoid it. But the British had no such advantage over the American militia.

Since the militia was comprised of every able-bodied adult male in an area, the militia could arise wherever the British deployed. Thus, no matter how fast the British could move, they could almost never move fast enough to avoid a confrontation with the militia.

So, ironically, because most Americans were too independent to enlist in the Continental Army, and because Americans stayed near their farms most of the time, the American fighting effort was endowed with a tactical mobility to match the British mobility at sea. Wherever there were Americans, there was a militia ready to take up arms whenever the Redcoats ventured nearby.

In other words, the insistence of the people on staying rooted to their land gave the American war effort a quick reaction time that it otherwise would have lacked if the Americans, like their European cousins, had been disciplined enough to serve en masse in a professional uniformed army. As historian Daniel Boorstin put it, "The American center was everywhere and no where -- in each man himself."

When British regulars met American militias on open fields, the British training usually prevailed. At the battle of Kip's Bay in Manhattan, the Connecticut militia broke and fled in terror, despite General Washington's attempts to restore order. Militia collapsed again at the battle of Camden in 1780.

The Americans could afford some losses in battle; a large fraction of the adult white male population was available to fight British who invaded their region. British soldiers, though, were more difficult to replace, since they had to be imported from across the Atlantic.

The British held major coastal cities such as Boston and New York City, but control of the vast interior proved impossible. The militiamen had learned warfare from the Indians; in the mountains and swamps and forests, they denied use of the country to the British. Because the American militiamen were not part of a professional standing army fighting far away from home, they had the advantages of intimate knowledge of the terrain where they fought, of support from the non-combatant population in the area and of a compelling incentive to defend their state, county and farms against foreign aggression.

After the 1780 capture of Charleston, the British quickly seized more towns in the interior along the Savannah River. In the country around the river, chaotic civil war broke out between Tories loyal to the king and patriots seeking independence. As a result, the Redcoats could control nothing beyond the cities on the banks of the Savannah.

Fear of the "countryside in arms" led the British War Office to ban expeditions to almost all of the American interior in 1778.

The militia had good days to match the bad ones. At the battle of Cowpens in South Carolina, the militia, under the command of Brigadier General Daniel Morgan, pretended to break and run after firing a few shots. The British rushed ahead to rout the fleeing militia. With the British committed, American cavalry swept in on the left and right of the attacking Redcoats. In front of the Redcoats, the militia stopped "fleeing" and took up prearranged positions in the line with the Continental Army. General Morgan's double envelopment destroyed almost all the British army on the field that day. Only a small force of cavalry reserves escaped.

In the 1777 Saratoga campaign, the British attempted to move down from Canada and up from New York City to meet on the Hudson River, hoping to isolate New England from the rest of the colonies. The militia of upstate New York and Vermont rose in large numbers wherever the British appeared. Ready to fight, the American populace had been outraged at the murder of a beautiful white woman by Indians who had been armed by the British.

British General Burgoyne complained, "Wherever the King's forces point, militia in the amount of three or four thousand people assemble in 24 hours; they bring with them their subsistence, etc., and the alarm over, they return to their farms..."

At the battle of Freeman's Farm, near Saratoga, New York, riflemen hiding in the woods killed many Redcoats. Weeks later, when Burgoyne was in full retreat from New York, the militia sliced his supply lines. His 6,000 men and all their military provisions fell into the hands of the Americans.

After the British disaster in the Saratoga campaign, the great British statesman, William Pitt -- an advocate of reconciliation with America -- told the British House of Lords, "If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I would never lay down my arms -- never -- never -- NEVER! You cannot conquer America." (Speech in the House of Lords, Nov. 18, 1777)

In 1778-79, the Kentucky militia, led by George Rogers Clark, captured key British posts on the Wabash River in the future states of Indiana and Illinois. The victories helped legitimize the United States' claim to all British territory east of the Mississippi, which Britain later recognized in the 1783 peace treaty.

The militiamen brought their privately owned guns to battle. For the most part, they fought with the Kentucky rifle, which had a shattering effect against British Redcoats. The British muskets could fire three times as fast as the Kentucky rifle, and were well-suited for use by disciplined linear formations in open terrain. Redcoats were not expected to aim, depending instead on the cumulative effect of rapid fire. American guerrillas, though, did not fight formal pitched battles, but instead hid behind rocks and trees and sniped at the enemy.

The Kentucky rifle was effective only in the hands of a skilled marksman, who could hit a target the size of a man's head from 200 yards away. A lucky shot could travel 400 yards. The rifling of the gun's bore, which gave the bullet a spin, vastly extended the effective combat range for gunmen. The rifle was actually invented by the Pennsylvania Dutch, not by Kentuckians -- and the Pennsylvania Dutch were actually German, not Dutch.

The American riflemen specialized in sniping at the British officers, causing them considerable apprehension, and distracting them from command. The British officers, in turn, denied the American riflemen quarter, considering them executioners rather than honorable soldiers.

The bitter experience of fighting an armed populace left the British with a clear understanding of the threat that armed citizens pose to an unpopular dictatorship. When British victory appeared in sight in 1777, Colonial Undersecretary William Knox authored a plan "What Is Fit To Be Done In America?" Knox suggested establishment of a state church, unlimited tax power, a governing aristocracy, a standing army, repeal of the militia laws, a ban on arms manufacture, a ban on arms imports without a license, and "...the Arms of all the People should be taken away." (Sources of American Independence, vol. 1 (1978), p. 176)

Sadly, almost every one of Undersecretary Knox's 1,777 suggestions for enslaving America has become law in modern America, or is currently advocated by many powerful politicians.

As Continental Army General George Washington often noted, the militia could rarely hold its own against regular troops. Echoing the criticisms made by British commanders, Washington complained that the militia's"...want of discipline and refusal, of almost every kind of restraint and Government, have produced...an entire disregard of that order and subordination necessary to the well doing of an army." (Letter to the President of the Continental Congress, New York, Sept. 2, 1776)

But the militia did not have to fight by European standards and win battles against disciplined linear formations. Because almost every free male was armed, the American resistance existed wherever the American people lived. The British occupied every major port. When they fought, they usually won. But defeating America was not simply a matter of capturing its major cities or crushing its uniformed army.

With every American a militiaman, the British could triumph only by occupying the entire United States, and that task was far beyond their manpower resources. The Americans never really defeated the British; the war could have continued long past Yorktown. After seven years of winning most of the battles but getting no closer to winning the war, the British simply gave up.

The experience of the American Revolution has been repeated over and over throughout the world. Citizen armies can rarely defeat an unpopular government outright, but they can deny the government the fruits of ruling the country and force the government to expend more and more resources in a futile effort to conquer an entire population. The Jewish freedom fighters who drove the British out of Palestine in the 1940s, the guerrillas who helped topple dictatorships in Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s, the Yugoslav partisans who tied down a sixth of the Nazi Army during World War II, and the Afghani guerrillas who resisted the invading Soviet Army in the 1980s have taught despots the lesson American militiamen taught the Redcoats 200 years ago: An armed and determined citizenry can make even the world's most powerful armies rue the day they attempted to rule a nation against its will.

Further reading: Much of the information in this article is based on Robert W. Coakley's and Stetson Conn's book, The War of the American Revolution, (Washington: Center of Military History United States Army, 1975), which is available in many Government Printing Office bookstores, and can be special ordered at any conventional bookstore.