By Bill Kossler

By Bill Kossler

Rappahannock News Staff Writer

Hunting and guns have been a facet of country living in Virginia since the earliest European settlers came into these mountains. Whether for hunting, protecting cattle from predators, or shooting skeet, targets or cans for fun, for most of the histoiy of this area, owning a gun would have been as important as owning a car.

Even before Washington became a town, it was the site of a trading post serving a few settler families and the native population. Guns would have been the big, top dollar item at that trading post nearly three hundred years ago.

Today in Rappahannock County if you want a gun, the place to go is Trading Post Guns just outside of Washington. Sitting by the side of US 211, on the route of the original colonial era Chester Road, Ken Carter’s Trading Post Guns has a wide selection of weapons for a broad variety of purposes. For hunting, they have numerous big game and small game rifles and shotguns. For target shooting, they have C02 pistols, rifles, handguns, sights, scopes and all the related hardware. And you can special order almost anything you might want through his catalog business.

If your heirloom hunting rifle has a broken firing pin or needs a new sight mount, Carter also runs a full service repair shop through the store. Many days, if you pop in, you’ll find Carter there behind the counter, a rifle in a clamp, or a handgun disassembled on the work bench, while he fits a sight, retaps stripped screw holes or repairs a stock.

Glock

While there are numerous gun stores in the surrounding counties, Carter says Trading Post Guns has carved out a niche as both one of the largest handgun providers and “one of the best sources of civilian versions of military weaponry, assault rifles, and the like.” Carter is the regional Glock handgun representative, selling sidearms to law enforcement and military personnel. As the sole area Glock representative,

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