Great thread!
Civil folks discussing what should always be a civil subject.
Personally, to me, it's the guns my brother, it's all about the guns, that and the beautiful aroma of burning Blackpowder!...
That was my very first attraction, many, many years ago, and likely my very strongest attraction to this wonderful Hobby of ours.
I have not been PC / HC since sometime in the late 1970s to mid 1980s, even then I was not 'totally PC, nor did I ever try to preach the PC / HC doctrines.......and a lot of water, lead, and powder has run under that bridge of life since that time.
The criticism of the PC Police regarding this Hobby has cost us heavily, while the praise and encouragement of those practicing Living History has had their hands full trying to keep up.
It is somewhere in between all this that many, if not most, find comfort in this sport.
Myself, I am a bona fide gun nut. Never met a gun yet that I didn't fall head-over-heels for. Old guns, new guns, broken guns with missing parts, they're all good.
Btw, Oldetexian, my Walker Colt doesn't take kindly to those "unkind" words....
It's all good! Just some is a wee bit "more gooder" than others.
I truly appreciate THIS thread.
This is the type thread that promotes harmony from within, which is somewhat hard to find nowadays.
Please don't misconstrue my previous comment as saying, "Guns is the ONLY thing I like about this Hobby" because I can pass muster at about any get together short of AMM. That still does not mean I don't literally love the guns of that era.
Others have said it much better, and a lot more graciously, that what I said in my previous post, but the living history part of this Hobby is strong inside me, and I practiced that a lot when I was somewhat younger.
And that was long before the Bicentennial, T/C, Ithica, Hatfield, CVA, and Lyman became household words, even before the sport of Muzzleloading itself ever became popular.
Back then, during the 1950s and 60s, any knowledge of Muzzleloaders suddenly made you the Subject Matter Expert.
The local go-to guy for everything Muzzleloading, he seemed to have all the answers on every imaginable aspect of the sport.
Also, back then, a lot of "bad" information was handed out as fact, and later on that put a lot of very sour grapes in the pudding of us oldtimers of today.
Then, in the late1970s and mid-80s, a new breed, along with a new name came on the scene, they were called PC & HC.....
The one thing, and likely the most important thing of all that they brought with them, was the demise of many "Old Wives" tales, stories that many of us had been led to believe as solemn truths for a good 25 to 30 years, prior to their arrival.
Some also brought their newly learned knowledge to a whole new level, and that level was nothing short of criticism, criticism toward those who professed to know less, or things never heard of before their entry.....but, instead of teaching and making welcome the unwashed part of the group, they choose to pick at the small stuff, small stuff that when left to grow and materialize would someday make a fine Buckskinner, instead they suddenly somehow felt elite in their new found knowledge, and the rest of this story is history.