>My guess would be hunting. I know that in Nevada, California and
>Washington states there's a separate (and earlier) black powder
>hunting season. Meaning you could, if you were really into it, get
>three tags: Bow, Black Powder, and Modern Rifle.

Ah, of course. And the manufacturers have cannily realized that there's a ready (and probably larger than the vintage-repros one) market of people who are inclined to ignore the spirit of that rule entirely and kit themselves out with hyper-advanced equipment that has laser sights and whatnot because, as that quintessential thespian Wesley Snipes once observed, some motherfucker's always trying to ice-skate uphill. :)

Although, that said, I rather like the advanced muzzleloading gear I've seen, in spite of my earlier snark. I still think it's pointless (or I did before you described what the point most likely is), but it's interesting, in a weird parallel-21st-century-where-the-cartridge-was-never-invented kind of way. It's like the firearm equivalent of the anti-steampunk backlash I once envisioned, in which instead of making faux-Victorian future stuff, people made faux-modern 19th-century stuff.

Apropos of nothing, I used to have a personal website, long ago when that kind of thing was still something you nailed together yourself in the electronic equivalent of the garage if you were too proud to use GeoCities, and one of the pages on that site was a tour of my firearms collection. Amazingly, it didn't occur to me for years how monumentally stupid that was; even more amazingly, my house was never broken into by someone looking to score some free guns. Mind you, most of my collection is junk* and at least one of the pieces in it would probably kill you if you tried to shoot someone with it, but still, that was pretty dumb.

--G.
* but charismatic junk**
** band name
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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