Instead of trying to come up with an original post while crammed into a hotel room with 2 small kids on our annual excursion to the coast I’ll post a roundup of observations from my fellow gunbloggers.

Starting off we have some Thomas Jefferson coverage with The Declaration of Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms and more coverage of Citizens, Not Subjects over at Sispey Street Irregulars.

You can read the Declaration of Independence from Boots & Sabers and Walls of the City.

Borepatch looks at what the Founding Fathers would think of the Tea Party movement. New Jovian Thunderbolt has some awesome videos of Anvil Shooting, a 4th of July tradition.

Les Jones has a bunch of cool infrared pics of fireworks, and Breda has John Adams’ thoughts on the even of Independence.

I will update this post as the day progresses, and I have time between trips to the beach.

Flag credit to Jonathon Colman

And Thomas Jefferson realized this after writing the 1st draft of the Declaration of Independence. According to new information discovered by the Library of Congress he obliterated the word subjects so thoroughly that it took modern technology to determine what he had originally written.

But in a moment when history took a sharp turn, Jefferson sought quite methodically to expunge the word, to wipe it out of existence and write over it. Many words were crossed out and replaced in the draft, but only one was obliterated.

Over the smudge, Jefferson then wrote the word “citizens.”

Read more at this Washington Post article.

Happy Independence Day my fellow Citizens!

HT to Standard Mischief

I’ve switched over to using rawdog to parse the feeds for gunbloggers.com instead of rolling my own. It uses some of the same python modules, but generates a static page for much lower load on the system.