"These problems aside, Washington did get his army. He opened the federal repositories to arm the troops he led into the field against the Whiskey Rebels; his force was larger than any he had commanded in the Revolution. The rebellion simply evaporated before such a show of force; the only deaths came from a pistol going off accidentally and a drunken brawl that ended with a fatal bayonet wound. One can only speculate whether the Whiskey Rebels would have behaved differencely had they known just how ignorant of firearms were most of Washionton's troops. Hardly a disciplined force, the goernment militia looted, drank heavily, and beat civilians randomly. It was neither well trained nor well armed. General Samuel Smith, commander of the Maryland militia, reported to the House of Representatives that the majority of the Virginia and Maryland troops were ignorant of the use of arms. Many did not know how to load a musket, and others had never carried one in their lives."
From Michael Bellesiles, Arming America

So, I'm reading that book above; way excellent. All about the fact that no one owned a gun, more or less, from the Pilgrims up through the Civil War, because people really knew nothing and blamed spirits and aethers for bad gunpowder. Americans were lousy shots, with something like one broken gun per fifteen people, and one working gun for every hundred people. It even seems likely that the only reason why the Founding Fathers put that Second Amendment bit in isn't to protect American's gun rights, but to encourage Americans to own guns in case they had to join the militia, since practically no white American citizen even knew how to shoot back then. Hunting had nothing to do with it, since by far the most effective hunting is done with traps, and every government passed huge gun control laws from day one, usually against the poor, slaves, and Native Americans, but also against owning dueling pistols, carrying weapons in public places, and unregulated hunting.

Against that though, is the fact that environmentally speaking, we need hunting now more than we ever needed it in the past, for the simple fact that we've populated so many areas that there simply isn't the ecological robustness for, say, a deer population to go through a full malthusian cycle and recover appropriately. For example, in Vermont in the 1970's, prohibitions on hunting does meant that the deer population reached a point where thousands of deer were starving to death every winter. Therefore, we have reached a weird, ironic point where we base our rights to own guns off of people who neither had nor knew how to use guns and needed the government to prod them to even buy them in the first place, while today, when we actually have strong conservationist arguments to keep some basic hunting guns, we argue whether or not guns are even necessary to our modern society; in short, we didn't need guns then, but we do now - but we think we needed guns then, but don't now. (Note: I'm not talking about pistols and assault rifles and such - which more than likely contribute much more to crime than they do personal safety, and certainly do nothing to intimidate the government and preserve our liberties - but the principle of hunting as a basis for even a single type of personal gun ownership.) Weird thing, society.

That Is All For Now.