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Originally Posted by TexKan  Is it cause your new CC law doesn't allow for the the old shoot em up Dodge of yesteryear?.......... what is it? |
"The first shocking thing you learn when you start "mining’ for such information is that it was much safer to live in a place like Dodge City than in a place like New York City or Chicago – my how things change, right? If you look real hard at the record of Dodge City, Kansas from the time the cattle herds started shipping from there until the last year as a "cow town" – a span of about 15 years you can come up with approximately 15 people who died by violence. Yep that’s fifteen, not 150, in a period of 15 years. An average of 1 per year. However in the worst year, five people died so there were several years in that 15 in which no one was killed in Dodge City. A couple of those are famous incidents which get told and retold. One is the cowboy who was killed by the officers Earp and Masterson. One was Bat’s brother Ed who was mortally wounded by one of two cowboys named Walker and Wagner, who were in turn shot by Bat Masterson (both survived the shooting). Another, not so well known homicide was the accidental shooting of Dora Hand by a drunk on the street when the bullet went through several walls and hit her in the head as she slept.
Now everyone knows of the famous sign which orders all the visitors to Dodge City to check their guns. What you might not be aware of is that there were, in effect, actually two Dodge Cities adjacent to one another, split by a spur line of the railroad called the "deadline". The sign was there for mostly for the benefit of those who visited the saloons and brothels south of the deadline. While It was the denizens on the "other side of the tracks" who were required by law to disarm when they ventured into town. So, in this little microcosm of western society we have an excellent comparison of just how effective restrictive gun laws actually are. Now of the 15 people who perished by violence in Dodge City’s most violent years, just how many do you think fell victim North of the Deadline. If you guessed 0 you would be right! Now isn’t that amazing. You take a town and put all of the miscreants, rebel rousers, and assorted ne’er-do-wells in one area, forbid the carrying of weapons by those who frequent a certain part of town, and ALL of the homicide occurs there. "Gun Control" works just as well today as it did then. Dodge City is not the exception. Tombstone, where the Earps moved, enjoyed the same proscription on going armed, though it was truly a violent place, the violence was contained in the area near the controlled section of town. There are numerous other examples.
While the above may come as a surprise to you, it has not gone unnoticed by scholars. In his book The Western Peace Officer, Frank Prassel notes: "As a place of lawlessness the frontier’s spectacular reputation is, therefore, largely without substantiation. It is true that a band of daring outlaws, enraged over ‘land theft’ might sweep down from their mountain stronghold to terrorize an isolated village, take command of a courthouse, and shoot or capture local peace officers. But these events did not occur in the distant past, they tool place in 1967. While a passenger going through Nevada during the 1860s might certainly have been in some danger of hijacking, he probably enjoyed greater security than his counterpart flying over Florida in a jet airliner a century later…."
We’ve come a long way, haven’t we. Several thousand gun laws later we still aren’t as safe as the citizens of Dodge City." End of quote.