Personal Story: While in Ketchikan, Alaska many years ago I witnessed two people trying to pull into the same parking spot. The man in the red pickup truck got out and placed his hand on the gun he had holstered in plain sight. The gunman got the parking spot.
One of the hidden truths is that old western town like Dodge and Tombstone were centuries ahead of the modern United States when it comes to gun control.
While the NRA teaches that the Wild West was a place where everyone wore a gun on their hip, that is a lie. By the 1870's Dodge had a city ordinance forbidding anyone to carry a gun north of the Deadline. Abilene's ordinance was enforced by Wild Bill Hockok. There were no "concealed carry" exceptions. Resisting Tombstone's 1881 ordinance led those well know Second Amendment advocates, the Clanton Gang, to their famous shootout at the O.K. Corral against Wyatt Earp.
As the west civilized they quickly realized that the people toting guns were mostly thugs and criminals, if everyone was allowed to carry guns no decent person was safe. The NRA's position is a perversion of that very common sense.
Dodge City's Deadline: So called because anyone senseless enough to venture across the line was risking death. Dodge set the line as the railroad tracks. To the south, the wrong side of the tracks, was the Red Light District. There is where the lawless ruffians could carry guns, drinking and whoring and killing as they wished. Should they dare travel north of the tracks, however, the law waited to arrest them, for even carrying a gun north of the Deadline was against the law. It is passing strange that the NRA wants the whole of the United States to be like Dodge's Red Light District.
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2 comments:
More NRA bashing and perversion of the truth? These were all LOCAL CITY ORDINANCES--even as you told them. None of those ever applied to the whole of the Wild West in general outside those township limits. The very same applies today. While New York City, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Jersey, Washington D.C., and several other overpopulated metro centers brag of their abolishment of America's constitutional rights, they are all placed at the very pinnacle of the cesspool list of the worst crime statistics ANYWHERE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD! Nothing to brag about there. -7-
Why is it that the introduction of ANY fact contrary to the NRA party line is construed as "bashing" and "perversion of the truth?"
The fact is that the lawlessness of the Old West was always perceived as a problem -- even in its day. Regulation of firearm use (including carriage) in a populated area made sense then, and makes sense now. Unless one believes that the Founding Fathers envisioned Uzis in grade schools, such regulation is common sense application of the law, not "trampling of rights."
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