by Doug Collins
The Free Press
The myth of the gun-happy 19th century American West is as false as the mountains in the background of the TV series Gunsmoke, which was set in mountainless Dodge City, Kansas. In fact, gun control was in many places much stricter in the days of the "Wild" West than it is now.
In his book The Cattle Towns, an account of life in Kansan cow towns in the 1870s and '80s, Robert Dykstra claims that gun control was a feature of all such settlements.
Craig Miner, a history professor at Wichita State University, confirmed Dykstra's descriptions of the city of Wichita by scrutinizing the newspapers of the era. According to Miner, access to Wichita was controlled by a toll bridge where travelers had to turn in their guns. The travelers could later reclaim their guns upon leaving the city. No guns were allowed in the city.
The result was a murder rate of probably about 6 per 100,000 in a year, substantially lower than the modern national average of approximately 9 per 100,000 (of which nearly two-thirds are committed by guns).
Says Miner, "The surprising thing about these findings is that the murder rate was low, even considering that there was a young, rough, mostly male, transient population in these cities. In addition, most shootings at that time would have resulted in death because of poor medicine. Nowadays many shooting victims survive."
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Contents on this page were published in the December/Jan, 1994 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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