Long bows, Long rifles the M14 and the rise of Tyranny

  Lately I have been thinking about the English long bow, yes I’ve been reading Bernard Cornwal again. It was truly an amazing weapon system combining power, accuracy and a very high rate of fire. You can usually get two of the three in a weapon, almost never all three. And it was cheap, the common peasant foot soldier could afford one, or even make his own. The only weapon that came close to it in outclassing it’s contemporaries in the power, accuracy and rate of fire was the M1 Garand and it was most definitely not cheap at $90 each in 1935, well over 3 months wages for a working man.
The long bow allowed England with it’s small population and impoverished economy (In the middle ages military might grew directly from the fertility of your soil) to dominate the battlefields of Europe.
Benjamin Franklin is said to have claimed that had the Americans had archers instead of riflemen the war would have been two years shorter. There is some merit in this line of thinking the range of the long bow and the Kentucky rifle are usually both cited as being about 300 yards, but when it comes to rate of fire they diverge. A rifleman might load and fire one shot per minute, while a longbow man fired 6.
This begs the question, why did the longbow go out of use so soon? No one seems to have a good answer. The only pitfall of the long bow was that it was a difficult weapon to master, requiring as many as ten years of training., and that it was punishing to the user, most having to retire in their thirties due to the damage done to their shoulders.
That as am argument for why it was abandoned makes no sense to me many weapon systems take a great deal of time to master, and even today you won’t find that many 30 year old infantry men on the battle field.
Some have argued that as peasants became wealthier they found more exciting things to do with their leisure than practicing, and competing in archery. This I also find hard to believe.
The best argument I think is that the nobility began to fear the common man armed with a cheap powerful weapon, one that could pierce the most expensive armor and at distances from 6 feet to 300 yards made the finest Damascus sword irrelevant. It is noteworthy that the Robin Hood legend of medieval insurrection centers on the long bow. Could pike men have forced the king to sign Magna Carta?
The people in power anxious to stay that way stopped promoting archery then began to discourage it out right.
As I stated earlier the only thing that comes close to the long bow in power, rate of fire and accuracy is the Garand, or rather it’s more modern variant the M14. Like the long bow it takes some time to master (thankfully not 10 years) and like the long bow it is with in the purchasing power of the working man. It cost less than a used car and unlike the car will last a lifetime.
Strangely the M14 has been abandoned by our military and thousands of them have been torched to keep them out of civilian hands.