Smithsonian: The Wild West Had Gun Control (and it Failed Then, Too) – IOTW Report

Smithsonian: The Wild West Had Gun Control (and it Failed Then, Too)

Breitbart: On February 5, Smithsonian magazine published a column to prove gun control existed in the Wild West and inadvertently demonstrated that gun control failed then, in Tombstone, Arizona, as it does now, in Chicago, Illinois.

The Smithsonian article opens by challenging a romanticized view of the Wild West, positing instead an image of cattle down after cattle town where firearms were heavily regulated.

It presents Tombstone as a case in point and set the background for readers:

Marshall Virgil Earp, having deputized his brothers Wyatt and Morgan and his pal Doc Holliday, is having a gun control problem. Long-running tensions between the lawmen and a faction of cowboys – represented this morning by Billy Claiborne, the Clanton brothers, and the McLaury brothers—will come to a head over Tombstone’s gun law.

The laws of Tombstone at the time required visitors, upon entering town to disarm, either at a hotel or a lawman’s office. (Residents of many famed cattle towns, such as Dodge City, Abilene, and Deadwood, had similar restrictions.) But these cowboys had no intention of doing so as they strolled around town with Colt revolvers and Winchester rifles in plain sight. Earlier on this fateful day, Virgil had disarmed one cowboy forcefully, while Wyatt confronted another and county sheriff Johnny Behan failed to persuade two more to turn in their firearms.  MORE

19 Comments on Smithsonian: The Wild West Had Gun Control (and it Failed Then, Too)

  1. “cattle down after cattle town”

    Doesn’t Breitbart have editors? At first reading, I wondered if the old west was shooting their cows all over the place: “cattle down!”

  2. Claudia, you should see the stuff that goes on at the LA Times. Have mercy, I started to fix one or two words, kept on reading and saw so many more errors. Then I thought, “Why the hell am I doing THEIR job for free???” I’m getting to the point where if I see an apostrophe out of place, I don’t want to post the story. LOL.

  3. Western “No Gun Zones”. What could go wrong? We go to the movies about once every three months and I get pissed because I can’t legally carry. I can imagine how the cowboys felt.

  4. Forgot to add: Yeah, there’s a story coming up where an author uses the apostrophe all care-free. I won’t even go to it when it publishes. It pains me that someone is getting paid to write that way. 🤣

  5. When you have communities (states or nations) with strict guns laws you also have overly vigorous law enforcement, which in turn can cause an OK Coral incident involving law abiding citizens (McLaury brothers). Or ruby ridge, Finicum or Waco, where law enforcement controls the actions, narrative and the media prints the narrative and lauds their actions.

  6. “Tombstone had much more restrictive laws on carrying guns in public in the 1880s than it has today,”

    So what you’re saying is that Tombstone was able to become the peaceful town it is today once they ditched gun control. Got it.

  7. Wasn’t that a movie?

    “Apostrophe, Now” – a weird pretentious makeover of “Shart of Snarkness” which is concerned with the many forms and abuses of punctuation.
    Not to leave out “Parenthetically Speaking.”
    Or the “Comma Chameleon.”
    “Plural or Possessive – That is the Question.”

    izlamo delenda est …

  8. @B_B , you know the nationwide press rules, never report LEOs shooting an innocence white guy, always report the shooting of a minority, especially if done by a white LEO. Did you watch the second video of the LEO giving a statement about what happened. He only mentioned the cops shot two armed men at the store. Nothing said about one of them being completely innocent.

    Yep, the real life Barney Fifes scare me too. My son is 21yo, just got his CCP, he’s living in Ohio. After advising him to always remember the safety rules, to be dammed careful about any interactions with police. He is in western Ohio, which is ok afaik. It’s the county near Canton / Akron that has a reputation for trigger happy abusive cops. There are some real nasty videos of those guys in action. Maybe they’ve improved in recent years but I wouldn’t count on it .

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