Then I started to read and hear all the political commentators bring up the topic of 'gun control'. The facts of the massacre were not even clear yet and some people were calling for the banning of private ownership of firearms in the United States. I should have expected this from the minute I heard a gun was involved in the murders. Then somebody brought up the idea that the United States was descending into a sort of anarchy similar to the "wild west". This was the analogy that made me decide to write this post to the blog.

   The old west and the 'wild west' were really two very different things. Hollywood and dime novelists created the 'wild west'; this was a fictional world of romanticized violence. The 'wild west' was the place of the showdown at high noon and spaghetti-western shootouts. If you accepted the Hollywood version of history the old west was a world on constant gunplay and random violence.

   The historical reality of the old west was quite different from the Hollywood depiction. There was definitely violence in the old west; the legendary gunfights did occur and the gunfighters were very real historical figures. Most of these people and events were distorted by the media of the time and entertainment today. The gunfight at O.K. Corral did not take place in a corral; it actually took place nearer a photographer's studio. The incidence of gunfights in the streets was relatively rare; in the case of Deadwood, the legendary lawless community, there never was a single recorded gunfight of the sort Hollywood portrayed!

   The funny thing is that the old west was a time when it was not uncommon for people to be armed. There were communities that imposed local laws on bearing arms in public, such as Tombstone, but many places did nothing to restrict firearms. Laurie and I even visited a current day business in Deadwood that discovered it had iron plate in the floor between first and second floors; the reason why was because the miners would often bring their guns into the saloon on first floor and in a drunken celebration might fire into the ceiling. The girls on second floor simply didn't want to get shot in the back while they were working.

   Accidental firearm deaths did occur in Deadwood. There are newspaper records confirming this. There were also accidental deaths due to mining accidents, riding accidents and fires. It pays to know what you are doing with a weapon. It also pays to know what you are doing when you are mining for gold and riding a horse. Life is about risk. There are also public records in Deadwood of suicides; some by firearms, some by hanging, some by drug overdose. The problem might not have been the gun but the psychological malady that drove the person to suicide.

   This all leads me to wonder if banning guns would really make us any safer? It seems to me that only the law abidding citizens obey such laws. Sure, it might make it harder for the criminal to obtain firearms but we have banned certain illicit drugs for decades and the pushers and addicts still manage to get their fixes. In the meantime our law enforcement is woefully inadequate to protect us much less enforce any type of ban. In the time if often takes for the police to respond the victim is already dead. They had this same sort of problem in the old west. There were areas of the frontier where there was literally no law enforcement; sometime there weren't even laws! The solution for the pioneers, the prospectors, the railroads and even many town's people was to arm themselves. Quite often if worked. Look at the Northfield Raid; the James Gang suffered their worst defeat not at the hands of law enforcement but the well-armed citizens of the town!

   This further leads me to wonder what would have happened at Virginia Tech if even one person had been armed to take on the madman? Of course this couldn't have happened; there are rules there against bringing guns on campus...