I grew up around guns. It was very common in rural Pennsylvania in the 1970s to own a gun. The attitudes toward guns were very different back then. When I was growing up, I hardly ever heard anyone speak of a constitutional right to own guns. I never heard anyone say that they needed a gun to protect their families (even though most crime rates in the 1970s were much higher than they are today). I definitely did not hear anyone say that we needed guns in order to fight a potentially tyrannical federal government. Instead, most people who owned guns used them to hunt. My dad loved to hunt, and so did I. Most of the hunting that we did was small game. We hunted rabbits, squirrels, ruffed grouse, and woodcock. We sometimes went goose hunting, and my uncle took me deer hunting a few times. My dad thought that the only proper way to hunt small game was with a dog, so, over the years, we owned a few beagles, Brittany spaniels, English pointers, and English setters. Some of my fondest memories as a teenager were hunting with my dad on beautiful fall weekends.