Perhaps we just need to follow the money.

How appropriate for the vintage top end gun merchants and their hangers-on to wrap up the same string they started. This has been the elephant in the room during this whole discussion, and readers should listen for more of it.

How many tens-of-thousands of dollars of vintage shotguns do you Daryl, and Steven, buy, sell, repair, or create a year? How many of us have a Purdey 20 as our go-to game gun? Or write books to market to the men who do?

Clearly the greatest profits are to be made by people who fight to keep lead cheap, abundant and readily usable across all landscapes, public and private, to enhance the market, demand, and perception of the trade in luxury arms these men profit from. A trade greatly enhanced by maintaining the illusion that the realities of the modern world shall not intrude on the sporting gent. Can you see the pipes puffing?

Hughes is also a great craftman, while Daryl is just an avid collector and disposer of all those fine guns which no longer interest him. Both men serve a purpose, and are rewarded well for it. But mostly what they've got is more old double guns to sell. And I don't.

And where we really depart ways is to declare that a single biologist by sharing existing science is therefore vying for some unnamed mysterious grant monies... and this (ahah!) is the hidden profit motive really fueling the lead vs. non-toxic shot debate.... Now that just doesn't pass the straight face test.

I ain't the one with a Purdey in the corner, or living on acreage along the Gallatin or Bitterroot rivers in a fine log home. Or traveling to Vegas for gun shows, and who knows what else. I'm not a retired physician or beneficiary of my wife's family money daily pimping English side-by-sides to the unwashed. I'm living in a duplex with a muddy bird dog in the side yard reloading on a Duo-matic.

Vintage gun merchants is where we need to follow the money to, because this is where the profits are in this debate. This is where all the purple faces and stupid accusations come from. I'm sure the top end of the gun market has been a bit slow the last few years. And I genuinely sympathize until you start telling ridiculous and very personal lies about me. In this regard, you "gentlemen" should be ashamed of yourselves, because you are probably better than this.

Readers just need to tune their ear to this reality as they look at which information has really been of substance in this discussion, and distinguish it from that which contributed largely false personal accusations, name calling, and little else.

Time for the Commission to deliberate.