part 2
Lots of Guns, Little Crime

Mass violence, like what took place at the O.K. Corral, was actually infrequent. Moreover, the Old West reputation for lawlessness is unwarranted, despite, at times, an elevated number of homicides.
Crime such as rape and robberies occurred at a much lower rate than in modern America—certainly lower than in the 1970s and 1980s, when the nation was wracked by a surge in criminality.
It is also worth noting that crime and gun violence has fallen steeply since the 1990s, even as gun ownership has increased dramatically.

The crimes that did take place in the West were often violent confrontations between young men who were drunk or who got in a personal confrontation; it goes without saying that societies of mostly young men tend to be a little more violent than others. Hence the restrictions on gun usage that took place in some frontier communities.
For instance, historian Robert McGrath, who wrote a book about crime in the most notorious Old West towns, found that “robbery, theft, and burglary occurred infrequently,” and that “bank robbery, rape, racial violence, and serious juvenile crime seem not to have occurred at all.”
“While the homicide rate was high,” McGrath wrote, “the killings were almost always the result of fights between willing combatants.”
The few gun control-type laws that existed were poorly and inconsistently enforced, McGrath said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune.
Additionally, McGrath concluded that it was widespread gun ownership that deterred criminality in these areas in which law enforcement had little authority or ability to handle crime.
It was an old-fashioned illustration of John R. Lott’s “More Guns, Less Crime” thesis.
McGrath wrote that an “obvious factor” in discouraging burglary in the California frontier town of Bodie “was the armed homeowner or armed merchant.”

“No fewer [than] a half-dozen burglaries in Bodie were thwarted by the presence of armed citizens,” he wrote.

An even more dramatic instance of widespread gun ownership thwarting crime took place in Minnesota in 1876.
The Jesse James gang attempted to rob a bank in Northfield, but as the robbery was taking place, one merchant shouted, “Get your guns, boys—they’re robbing the bank!”
Armed citizens swarmed the crooks to protect their community and local business. They wore no uniforms and had no official mandate to step into the line of fire. But they acted bravely and unhesitantly in a time of crisis against highly organized criminals—a sharp contrast to what took place during the Parkland, Florida, school shooting, in which armed, trained members of law enforcement didn’t rush in to stop the shooter.

Northfield’s armed citizens killed a couple of the bank robbers and wounded many more. This effort by the good guys with guns helped put an end to the James gang and its string of crimes.

It is among many, many examples of how gun rights were not just valuable, but essential to public safety in the Old West.