Own a Musket for Home Defense

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About

Own a Musket for Home Defense, also known as Since That's What the Founding Fathers Intended, refers to a copypasta about a person defending his house against four robbers by shooting them with a musket and other outdated weaponry. Originating from a 2014 4chan discussion about using muskets for home defense purposes, the copypasta has since inspired numerous viral videos and memes over the years.

Origin

On November 14th, 2014, an anonymous 4chan^[1] user started a /k/ thread, writing, "serious question: how good is a musket for home defense?" In the thread, another user posted^[2] a greentext story imagining a person defending his home against two robbers with a musket, killing one by "putting a basketball-sized hole in him" and the other by stabbing him with a bayonet (shown below).

Own a musket for home defense, since that's what the founding fathers intended. Four ruffians break into my house. "What the devil?" As I grab my powdered wig and Kentucky rifle. Blow a golf ball-sized hole through the first man, he's dead on the spot. Draw my pistol on the second man, miss him entirely because it's smoothbore and nails the neighbor's dog. I have to resort to the cannon mounted at the top of the stairs loaded with grapeshot, "Tally ho lads" the grapeshot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off car alarms. Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified rapscallion. He Bleeds out waiting on the police to arrive since triangular bayonet wounds are impossible to stitch up. Just as the founding fathers intended.

On December 8th, 2014, Redditor iBleeedorange posted a screenshot of the post to the /r/4chan^[3] subreddit, where it gained over 14,000 upvotes in eight years with the image being widely reposted in the following years.

Spread

On June 27th, 2016, an anonymous 4chan user posted a rewritten version of the copypasta in a /k/^[4] thread (shown below, left). Sometime prior to September 23rd that year, an unknown user posted a slightly reworded version of the copypasta to Facebook with a screenshot of that post going viral (shown below, right).^[5]

On October 29th, 2018, Redditor Green272 posted this version of the copypasta to the /r/copypasta^[6] subreddit, where it received over 30,400 upvotes in four years.

On February 10th, 2019, YouTuber^[7] Mousey Poo posted a humorous video based on the copypasta that gained over 49,000 views in three years (shown below, left). On November 5th, 2020, YouTube^[8] user Gearhead posted a humorous animation that garnered over 2 million views in two years (shown below, right).

The copypasta maintained its popularity in the early 2020s as users continued to share it and use it as source material for animations and other videos.