Constitutional law prof: In 1880's Wild West, nobody believed that more guns reduced violence

[f_townsend]

If anything, people understood that more guns = MORE violence. Hence, the gun control provisions enforced by frontier towns. Only the gun lobby and the fools who follow it have promulgated the idea that "more guns = less crime".

The knowledge that the old West practiced gun control is also one of the reasons that Clarence Thomas, working closely with gun lobby attorneys, sinisterly crafted the Bruen ruling to limit judicial interpretation of gun control laws so that only history before ratification of the 14th amendment (i.e, before 1868) could be considered, thereby bypassing any examples of late 19th century gun control laws and ordinances which would ordinarily strengthen the argument in favor of today's existing gun control legislation.

Gun Control Is as Old as the Old West
Contrary to the popular imagination, bearing arms on the frontier was a heavily regulated business

Matt Jancer
February 5, 2018

...

The “Old West” conjures up all sorts of imagery, but broadly, the term is used to evoke life among the crusty prospectors, threadbare gold panners, madams of brothels, and six-shooter-packing cowboys in small frontier towns – such as Tombstone, Deadwood, Dodge City, or Abilene, to name a few. One other thing these cities had in common: strict gun control laws.

...

Frontier towns with and without gun legislation were violent places, more violent than family-friendly farming communities and Eastern cities of the time, but those without restrictions tended to have worse violence. “I've never seen any rhetoric from that time period saying that the only thing that's going to reduce violence is more people with guns,” says Winkler (Adam Winkler, UCLA professor of constitutional law). “It seems to be much more of a 20th-century attitude than one associated with the Wild West.”

...

As (historian Robert) Dykstra wrote, frontier towns by and large prohibited the “carrying of dangerous weapons of any type, concealed or otherwise, by persons other than law enforcement officers.” Most established towns that restricted weapons had few, if any, killings in a given year.

...

As the West developed, towns pushed this mythos of the West as their founding ideology. Lax gun laws were just a part of an individualistic streak that manifested itself with the explosion in popularity of concealed carry licenses and the broader acceptance of openly carrying firearms (open-carry laws) that require no permit.

“These Wild West towns, as they developed and became more civilized and larger, there was an effort to promote their Wild West heritage very aggressively, and that became the identity of the town,” says Winkler, “but that identity was based on a false understanding of what the past was like, and wasn't a real assessment of what places like Tombstone were like in the 1880s.”

[MutantAndProud]

1. So happy to see this circulate again

The false history propagated by the gun industry is simply mythology, and that mythology became part of a foundation of the religion of violence. The more this is talked about the more those ideological bubbles will burst.

[malaise]

2. Important

and yes I often remind myself that there were strict laws re gun control in the wild west

[world wide wally]

3. Their reading comprehension was higher back then.

They didn't twist the words of the Constitution to suit their biases as much as they do today.

[Chainfire]

4. Or was it their wisdom to not worry about what some dusty document in Philadelphia said, they

knew how to reduce violence in their towns and were going to do it.

[hunter]

5. My Wild West great grandmothers had zero tolerance for fools with guns...

... especially within their own families.

They were the sorts of women who could kill a bad man and ask the local sheriff to clean up the mess and fill out the proper paperwork.

One of my great grandma's considered her son-in-law a fool and made him dispose of his all his guns as a condition of living with her daughter.

Curiously the Army Air Corp hadn't trusted my grandfather with guns either. (Nor did they trust him to fly airplanes... he was an autistic spectrum klutz.) The Army in its wisdom started him out as an airplane mechanic and later trained him to be an engineer. Sometime during World War II he acquired a knack for metals like titanium, that were then considered quite exotic, and he was later an engineer for the Apollo Project. But nobody ever trusted him with guns -- not his own mom, not his mother-in-law, not his wife, not my own Wild West mom.

It's occurred to me that I've always existed within a Wild West matriarchy. My wife's family is similar.

I suspect that sort of matriarchy is the natural state of human culture, not the perverse patriarchy we now suffer.

Anybody who buys a semi-automatic rifle to get their "man card" should probably be neutered.

My Wild West great grandmas were extremely handy with knives and they longed for civilization.