#648 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Monday May 1)
Good morning,
HISTORY CAN TEACH AND SERVE AS A GUIDE
History provides important lessons and offers us the opportunity to see how others dealt with problems similar to our own. It also offers us the opportunity to learn from mistakes. There are experts around the world on nearly any period and event—great and minor—who can help us interpret the past and translate its lessons to today. As the number of college history majors continues to plummet (and, with it and fewer English majors, with a related decline in the ability to communicate), we may in the future find it more difficult to look to history for guidance.
With the decline of the teaching of history, the imposition of current political dogma on the curricula in our schools, the increase in misinformation in media, and a general decline in critical thinking, our society increasingly is prone to accept broad tropes that may or not be true. And we are inclined to accept the misinterpretation and mischaracterization of history by seeming “experts.”
THE MISUSE OF HISTORY
Justice Alito attempted to look toward the past in providing support for the majority opinion in the Dobbs case overturning Roe v. Wade. He premised his conclusion that the Constitution did not allow for the right to abortion. In his telling, the Founders did not contemplate the notion that abortions were legal because they didn’t expressly lay out that right in the Constitution. Never mind that many rights aren’t explicitly noted in Constitution, including the right not to be killed, the right to be safe in one’s home, the right to send a kid to private school, the right to travel across state lines, etc., etc., etc. Further, Mr. Alito also ignored the Ninth Amendment, which purports to preserve rights to the individual that aren’t expressly granted to the federal government, and he also ignored the actual facts disclosed by a careful reading of history. He apparently chose to dismiss the empirically provable data on abortions freely administered at the time and that can be found in the widespread practices of the day, as well as the presence in widely consumed publications of the day of “homespun” ways to conduct an abortion in the comfort of one’s home. This is just one example where history has been rewritten in the interest of current political expediency. There are other instances where a fictionalized accounting of American history is being utilized by people for their own political motives.
HISTORY HAS A STORY TO TELL
The other day I had lunch with my cousin (and fellow history major) Chris Cook. Besides the usual catching up, we lamented the lack of knowledge of our own history and the misuse and downright lying about that history. History—when reasonably accurately presented, in all its messiness, inconsistencies, and competing interpretations—is a valuable tool in understanding the human condition, analyzing similar circumstances from the past and learning from decisions made by our predecessors. The study of history discloses much—some of it worthy of emulation and some of it worthy of learning, and some of it to be avoided, so as to prevent such events from recurring. Some commonly accepted tropes about the past are just plain incorrect and, yet, are applied to current circumstances in the interest of political posturing.
GUN CONTROL IN THE “OLD WEST”
One of the areas of Chris’s and my shared interest is in the history of the American frontier. In the study of the frontier (both the expansion of the physical space, offering seemingly endless possibilities, but also the frontiers of societal development and of human passions), one can learn a great deal. Most of us know that the frontier has been idealized, popularized and dramatized over the years, through penny novels, entertainments like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and Hollywood.
One such distortion is that the old west was a safer place because people openly and freely carried weapons. The argument goes, “when everyone is armed, everyone is careful and polite.” People reciting this mantra resist reasonable gun control measures under the mistaken belief that the possession of a gun is among the best ways to reduce violence. They will post the random anecdote about a homeowner successfully shooting or driving away a thief as somehow warranting the uncontrolled expansion of gun ownership in America. Singular incidents such as this are reported as if they are the rule, rather than the exception.
The only problem with this argument is that it is just plain wrong. One need only go back to the stories of Bat Masterson and the Earps (Wyatt and his brothers), in Dodge City, Tombstone and elsewhere, to see that public safety in the Old West was assured by the prevalence of openly carried guns simply is a canard. In fact, the opposite is true. The West was plagued with lawlessness and senseless violence only in its earlier days, before these famed lawmen entered the scene. And their “Number One” tool for reducing violence? Gun control.
DODGE CITY, KANSAS
Dodge City, often thought of as one of the most violent of frontier towns, is instructive as to the evolution of mining camp or railroad construction hub into a town and later a city. It started out unsafe, as a camp at the eastern point of the Santa Fe railroad, home to all sorts of railroad workers. Eventually, a city government was established in 1878 which, among other things, banned horses upstairs, public drunkenness, and disorderly conduct.
Stephen Aron, a professor of history at UCLA, says the first law passed in Dodge City was one prohibiting the carry of guns in town, likely deemed by civic leaders a critical move to encourage people to move there, invest their time and resources, and bring their families. “Cultivating a reputation of peace and stability was necessary, even in boisterous towns, if it were to become anything more transient than a one-industry boom town.”
The following 1990 letter to the editor of The New York Times offers additional insight:
“…The businessmen of Dodge understood the potential for violence in a town full of drunken cowboys…. This is why there had to be gun-control laws. Men like Wyatt Earp, Jim and Ed Masterson, Bill Tilgman and Mysterious Dave Mather had a reputation, and their presence on the police force made these laws stick.”
“GUN CONTROL IS AS OLD AS THE OLD WEST”
Then there is Tombstone, Arizona, notoriously the site of the “gunfight at the OK Corral.” Here is the gun control situation there, from the February 5, 2018 issue of Smithsonian Magazine (with the above clever title…):
“It's October 26, 1881, in Tombstone, and Arizona is not yet a state…
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…
When the Earps and Holliday met the cowboys on Fremont Street in the early afternoon, Virgil once again called on them to disarm. Nobody knows who fired first. Ike Clanton and Billy Claiborne, who were unarmed, ran at the start of the fight and survived. Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers, who stood and fought, were killed by the lawmen, all of whom walked away.
The “Old West” conjures up all sorts of imagery, but broadly, the term is used to evoke life among the crusty prospectors, threadbare gold panners, madams of brothels, and six-shooter-packing cowboys in small frontier towns – such as Tombstone, Deadwood, Dodge City, or Abilene, to name a few. One other thing these cities had in common: strict gun control laws.”
A CONSTITUTIONAL LAWYER’S PERSPECTIVE
From the same article:
"’Tombstone had much more restrictive laws on carrying guns in public in the 1880s than it has today,’ says Adam Winkler, a professor and specialist in American constitutional law at UCLA School of Law. ‘Today, you're allowed to carry a gun without a license or permit on Tombstone streets. Back in the 1880s, you weren't.’ Same goes for most of the New West, to varying degrees, in the once-rowdy frontier towns of Nevada, Kansas, Montana, and South Dakota.
…’Gun control laws were adopted pretty quickly in these places,’ says Winkler. ‘Most were adopted by municipal governments exercising self-control and self-determination.’ Carrying any kind of weapon, guns or knives, was not allowed other than outside town borders and inside the home. When visitors left their weapons with a law officer upon entering town, they'd receive a token, like a coat check, which they'd exchange for their guns when leaving town.
The practice was started in Southern states, which were among the first to enact laws against concealed carry of guns and knives, in the early 1800s… Winkler, in his book Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, points to an 1840 Alabama court that, in upholding its state ban, ruled it was a state's right to regulate where and how a citizen could carry, and that the state constitution's allowance of personal firearms ‘is not to bear arms upon all occasions and in all places.’
…’People were allowed to own guns, and everyone did own guns [in the West], for the most part,’ says Winkler. ‘Having a firearm to protect yourself in the lawless wilderness from wild animals, hostile native tribes, and outlaws was a wise idea. But when you came into town, you had to either check your guns if you were a visitor or keep your guns at home if you were a resident.’”
A FINAL WORD
From Ed Butts, in Behind the Badge:
“The American Old West wasn’t the wild place of popular mythology… Only a handful of western communities ever saw a gunfight, and few men actually walked around wearing gun belts. That was because almost every town had a bylaw against the carrying of firearms. Those laws were strictly enforced by legendary lawmen such as Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, as well as the hundreds of unsung sheriffs and marshals who were responsible for public safety. The idea that every man carried his own law on his hip came out of Hollywood. The wandering gunslingers who have been romanticized in movies and TV shows were regarded by the people of their own time as riff-raff.”
And there you have it. The Old West actually was a safer place to live than popular history might suggest (perhaps even safer than our cities today), in no small measure due to gun control!
Have a good day,
Glenn
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