A museum in Virginia has an exhibit showing how important the long rifles were to that era. That's a good thing. They're a museum doing public education, for a specific topic, and era. All museums in all regions do that.
I remember when Las Cruces, NM opened a huge new "Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum". In a sleepy 200 year old former Mexican region that was part of the Spanish Camino Real (Royal Road) for many generations, they make a museum about a small part of the population (white ranchers) that successfully ranched for about 50 years, before the desert made it too difficult, but they're hanging on with their nails. Ignoring the 200 years of Spanish rule and the merging of them with the Indians. The Pueblo Indian culture was there for 1500 years before, one mesa-top village is probably the longest continually inhabited place in America. And the mining and space/rocket research that dominated the early 20th century and the late 20th century, ignored. Ranching? Very little done, for a very short period - it's all desert. Farming? Yes, but not with the Conestoga wagons and windmills the museum inserted in their displays. Basically, the two biggest museums there are for two isolated instances in time - the Billy the Kid stuff, and the Farm/Ranch museum.
However, Virginia (and the South) really did have an important history with long rifles. We should be glad for that, nowadays.
