Perission to Pack : Wild West Was Tamer Than Now

A popular dissuasion claims that if people carry handguns, Irvine and Brooklyn will descend to the quick-draw customs of Tombstone and Dodge City. In truth, writes W. Eugene Hollon in “Frontier Violence” (1974), the Old West was “a far more civilized, peaceful and safer place than American society today.”

There is no denying high homicide rates in frontier towns where day and night life was brothels, gambling halls and a saloon for every 25 men.

“These shootings amounted to consensual violence among disreputable young men who enjoyed getting drunk and into fights,” notes Colorado researcher David Kopel. “The presence of guns turned many petty drunken quarrels into fatalities.”

But in Bodie and Aurora, says historian Roger McGrath, the per capita annual robbery rate “was 7% of modern New York City’s. The old, weak, female, the innocent and those unwilling to fight were rarely the targets of attacks.”

No matter its Hollywood-warped reputation, says artist and Western biographer Bob Boze Bell, Tombstone was a sophisticated silver town with tennis courts, theater clubs, oyster bars, Kelly’s Wine House with two dozen imported wines, and, just around the corner from the OK Corral, Wyatt Earp’s favorite ice-cream parlor.

Said a writer passing through Tombstone in 1882: “[With] constant drinking and gambling . . . and universal practice of carrying deadly weapons, there is but one source of astonishment; that is that the cold-lead disease should claim so few victims. The small cemetery, over toward Contention Hill, so far from being glutted with slaughtered, is still comparatively virgin ground.”