A person has the right to keep and bear arms for the defense of self, family, home and state, and for lawful hunting and recreational use.
— West Virginia Constitution, Article III, Section 22

Most state constitutional provisions read like legal boilerplate. That one lists the reasons — self, family, home, state, hunting, recreation. That's not accident, that's a population that had specific situations in mind when they wrote it down, because those situations had already happened to them.

The first European settlement of consequence was Fort Henry, established at present-day Wheeling in 1774. The fort's garrison and surrounding settlers were armed almost entirely with long rifles — the so-called Pennsylvania rifle, a design refined by German immigrant gunsmiths in Lancaster County whose elongated barrel and smaller bore made it dramatically more accurate than the smoothbore muskets common elsewhere. Settlers in the western Virginia mountains adopted this rifle almost universally because they couldn't afford to miss.

"Couldn't afford to miss" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. When you're hauling powder and lead over a mountain on horseback, every shot has a real cost — there's no LGS two miles down the road. That context shaped a marksmanship culture that wasn't about sport, it was about not going hungry or getting killed. Worth thinking about the next time someone treats trigger time as casual entertainment.

The conflict eventually ended without a decisive resolution, leaving the...

The Paint Creek-Cabin Creek section — and the whole Mine Wars arc — is the part of West Virginia firearms history most people have never heard of. An armored train with a machine gun, martial law declared three times, an 83-year-old woman arrested by military authorities without trial. That's not folklore. That's documented history from about 110 years ago, on American soil, involving American workers and American guns pointed in multiple directions at once.

If you've ever had a conversation at the range about why ordinary people might feel strongly about not disarming, that history is a more grounded answer than most of the talking points you hear.

For those who've spent time in West Virginia — hunting, visiting family, passing through — did the firearms culture there feel different from other parts of the country, and if so, how would you describe it?

Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team