These boards have offered a great deal of speculation on what was the probable intent of the founders when they pushed James Madison into writing the Bill of Rights.

Most of the opinions offered are just that, opinions. These opinions have been mostly formed by the movie image of the stalwart colonial standing with his musket in hand, defending his land from the Indians and Brits and all other intruders into his peaceful, but threatened domain.

This fiction is maintained by opinion only in the same context as in the movie, Dirty Harry. Harry told us, "opinions are like assholes, everybody has one." This fiction is held as the opinion of those whose opinion stinks, but again we must consider the source.

To start with, there is no evidence this nation was ever a nation of gun owners, Mel Gibson movies aside. In fact, evidence suggests that owning firearms is more a collective rather than individual right.

There is research to suggest that wide-scale gun ownership only became a reality just prior to the Civil-War---not the Revolutionary War.

If you recall the Brits were marching from Boston to Lexinton and Concord because this is where the Minuetman guns and amunition was stored. These were comjmunity owned weapons--not privately owned.

There were no colonial sharpshooters, no guns in every home, no children learing to hunt at their fathers sides. You couldn't hit the proverbial side of a barn with a musket beyond 15 yards. Colonials were farmers who couldn't afford the investment in a musket. Or, they were trappers who hunted by trapping not shooting their game. Arrows worked in clearings, but in the heavy wooded areas of that time, an arrow or a musket ball were equally useless in the forest.

For war, the Brits had only muskets. The colonials had muskets and eventually some few Kentucky long rifles which could be aimed and were effective. Any company of Kentucky riflemen was a special target for the Brits and their muskets with attached bayonnets.

Remember the American Revolution lasted eight years, longer than any war in American history before Vietnam. One of the chief reasons was the lack of deadly weapons with which to wage the war.

The eagle-eyed frontiersman was a fiction of East Coast fiction writers developing propaganda to keep the spirit going, while the concept of a gun as a household necessity was an advertilsing ploy of gun maker Samuel Colt.

The former group fabricated a historic and heroic past while Colt preyed on the overblown fears of Indians and Blacks.

As a gun owner and gun fancier, I recognize my ownership of weapons comes from a questionable American custom and not a phony extended interpretation of the Second Amendment.