My brother is a sincere pacifist. He insists that the best way he knows to teach somebody to hate war is to tell them all the bloody details of a battle. He loves the history and he likes the guns as a part of that. But he's not a gun-nut. Of course, some of them are--but there are all kinds of approaches to every interest.

My mother quilts, so she made him a cot-sized (long and narrow) "memory" quilt. I think the pattern is an adapted Underground Railroad, with a Union star at one end. She replaced the center parts of the blocks with white rectangles and had people write advice to him on it in permanent ink. It also includes part of a period letter from one of our ancestors and a line from the book/movie _the Friendly Persuasion_ (about Quakers during the CW, since we're Quakers). There are lots of different things that can come out of reenacting besides accumulation of firearms.