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Check Your Gun Mister
Are We Safer than the Citizens of Dodge City?
By Jim Higginbotham
Sometimes the answers to seemingly complex social
problems are hidden in plain sight. Social engineers, lawmakers and
"experts" from all around spout off an endless stream of
statistics to support or rationalize their position one side or the
other of the "gun control" issue. Now I don’t like the
term "gun control" for it is ambiguous and usually used to
mask the real intent of those advocating it so for the purpose of this
discussion let us just say "more restrictive guns laws". One
might think that this is a relatively new idea, it is not! You can go
back to the Roman Empire and find the existence of cross bow control,
you can look to England and find attempts to disarm the various
colonists under their imperial thumb – the American colonists come
to mind as an unsuccessful attempt to debar the use of arms to an
indigent population. There are many examples of the failure of laws
which attempt to disarm the violent in our society but none are more
graphic as examples or easier to measure in effect than those in the
"wild west" of America circa 1870-1900.
Having read many statistical studies, and peer
reviews of same, I can say that most modern "scientific"
studies try to factor in way too many variables and cover way too much
in their data base. You see, statistics, generally, are used by those
who want to prove a point to confuse the simple minded who might just
have to vote on the issue. Or as Jeff Cooper so eloquently puts it –
"Statistics, in the main, are used by scoundrels to confound
fools". So let’s look at a simpler time and place where at
least we can identify the factors.
First let us dispense with some fictitious ideas
and misconceptions that many of us hold. Much of my early study in the
firearms field dealt with the gunfighters of the "old West"
– Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Johnny Ringo, etc. The guys who walked
in blood up to their ankles and killed a man before breakfast most
mornings – right? Would it surprise you to learn that there is no
record that Doc Holliday ever shot a man before the shootout at the OK
Corral in Tombstone about 5 years before his death – in bed. He had
been involved in a couple of barroom fights but it is recorded that he
actually never hit anybody with his pistol (he most likely was
wielding a shotgun in Tombstone that October day). That man of deadly
reputation Wyatt Earp likely never killed a man until that day either
though he did fire, along with Jim Masterson (the seldom mentioned
brother of Bat and Ed) at a rowdy cowboy who ran through town one
night. One bullet struck the cowboy in the arm and he later died but
no one knows if it was Wyatt’s or Masterson’s.
Now one might argue that the records of the times
were not as detailed or well organized as those compiled by the FBI
today but there are indeed records of what happened in most of the
towns who survived. Unlike the East, where many court houses were
burned during the Civil War, many of the post war western town records
survived just fine. Tombstone has an abundance of interesting court
cases to peruse as does Dodge City, Wichita and Hays City. Almost
every gunfight or bar fight that resulted in serious injuries ended in
an arrest and is recorded since there were charges filed and a hearing
after most of them. If you are willing to dig deep enough you can find
a pretty good idea of just how violent the "Wild West"
really was – not for a moment suggesting that isolated incidents of
extreme violence may not have been perpetrated in the sparse expanses
of wilderness or desert and went unreported.
The first shocking thing you learn when you start
"mining’ for such information is that it was much safer to live
in a place like Dodge City than in a place like New York City or
Chicago – my how things change, right? If you look real hard at the
record of Dodge City, Kansas from the time the cattle herds started
shipping from there until the last year as a "cow town" –
a span of about 15 years you can come up with approximately 15 people
who died by violence. Yep that’s fifteen, not 150, in a period of 15
years. An average of 1 per year. However in the worst year, five
people died so there were several years in that 15 in which no one was
killed in Dodge City. A couple of those are famous incidents which get
told and retold. One is the cowboy who was killed by the officers Earp
and Masterson. One was Bat’s brother Ed who was mortally wounded by
one of two cowboys named Walker and Wagner, who were in turn shot by
Bat Masterson (both survived the shooting). Another, not so well known
homicide was the accidental shooting of Dora Hand by a drunk on the
street when the bullet went through several walls and hit her in the
head as she slept.
Now everyone knows of the famous sign which orders
all the visitors to Dodge City to check their guns. What you might not
be aware of is that there were, in effect, actually two Dodge Cities
adjacent to one another, split by a spur line of the railroad called
the "deadline". The sign was there for mostly for the
benefit of those who visited the saloons and brothels south of the
deadline. While It was the denizens on the "other side of the
tracks" who were required by law to disarm when they ventured
into town. So, in this little microcosm of western society we have an
excellent comparison of just how effective restrictive gun laws
actually are. Now of the 15 people who perished by violence in Dodge
City’s most violent years, just how many do you think fell victim
North of the Deadline. If you guessed 0 you would be right! Now isn’t
that amazing. You take a town and put all of the miscreants, rebel
rousers, and assorted ne’er-do-wells in one area, forbid the
carrying of weapons by those who frequent a certain part of town, and
ALL of the homicide occurs there. "Gun Control" works just
as well today as it did then. Dodge City is not the exception.
Tombstone, where the Earps moved, enjoyed the same proscription on
going armed, though it was truly a violent place, the violence was
contained in the area near the controlled section of town. There are
numerous other examples.
While the above may come as a surprise to you, it
has not gone unnoticed by scholars. In his book The Western Peace
Officer, Frank Prassel notes: "As a place of lawlessness the
frontier’s spectacular reputation is, therefore, largely without
substantiation. It is true that a band of daring outlaws, enraged over
‘land theft’ might sweep down from their mountain stronghold to
terrorize an isolated village, take command of a courthouse, and shoot
or capture local peace officers. But these events did not occur in the
distant past, they tool place in 1967. While a passenger going through
Nevada during the 1860s might certainly have been in some danger of
hijacking, he probably enjoyed greater security than his counterpart
flying offer Florida in a jet airliner a century later…."
We’ve come a long way, haven’t we. Several
thousand gun laws later we still aren’t as safe as the citizens of
Dodge City.
Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition
Jim Higginbotham
Bibliography
The Western Peace Officer. By Frank Prassel,
University of Oklahoma Press 1972
Queen of the Cow Towns, Stanley Vestal, Harper & Row, 1952 |
