Wearing a dirk casually

[OC Richard]

I'm a Canadian and I have been a member of this site for a couple of years now. Something that has always made me wonder why is, why is it so important to Americans to be armed...

It might be veering dangerously offtopic to comment on this (and yes my post will soon get onto the dirk thing) but as an American this intrigues me just as much as it does you.

I'm from West Virginia and the situation there is much like the situation Jock Scot describes in Britain: people who do sport hunting have the guns you use for that. The difference is that Jock Scot says a small percentage of the British population does sport hunting, while a large percentage of West Virginians do sport hunting, in particular deer hunting.

It goes to figure: West Virginia is vast tracts of dense forest teeming with millions of deer, and very few people! So you have your deer rifle and you go hunting in deer season. Seems like everyone has a deer rifle in their house. But your deer rifle is like your saw or hammer or drill- it's a tool for a specific function. It's not a collectable, it's not a doo-dad.

The stuff I hear all the time about "gun nuts" and people romanticizing guns etc comes from the imagination of outsiders and is foreign to my people. There are still many Appalachians who live off the land (they are Hunter-Gatherers, in truth) and to them hunting is survival.

This all being the case, I don't wear a dirk when I'm piping because there's no purpose for it.

As for why so many Americans, when they dress up in Scottish attire, wear historical or quasi-historical things like rough knit bonnets, Jacobite/pirate shirts, 18th century weaponry, leather bag-like sporrans, moccasins, and so forth, I can only guess that they link Scottishness with the time period in which most of our Scots arrived.