The Mild West
It seems that every time a shooting in America makes headlines,
some wag in a European newspaper makes a remark about how “it’s like the Wild
West over there.” He’s right, but not
for the reasons he thinks.
Now, “everybody” knows that the American West in the 1800s
was a violent place, with daily duels in the streets, and characters such as
Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickock blazing away at the likes of Billy the Kid and
Jesse James.
And, as usual, “everybody” is wrong.
The great Westward Expansion Period of the 1860s thru the
1890s captured the imagination of the entire world. And a gaggle of hack writers cashed in on
this fascination, churning out dime novels that featured real-life people such
as Kit Carson and Calamity Jane in violent, 100% fictional adventures. (Of course, the vast majority of these hack
writers had never ventured further west than Altoona.)
Motion pictures were invented when Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
Show was at the height of its popularity, and the movie-makers sought to make
dime-novel-style action come alive on the silver screen. One of the most popular of these early movies
was The Great Train Robbery (1903),
the first Western “shoot ‘em up.”
Considered a cinematic milestone, Robbery
was filmed entirely in New Jersey (I kid you not).
As movies became more elaborate, stars such as Tom Mix,
Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, and John Wayne filled the silver screen with
clouds of gun smoke, and the “Wild West” legend became part of our popular
culture.
But when historians began to research the newspapers and the
official town records of the period, an entirely different picture began to
emerge.
Larry E. Schweikart,
professor of history at the University of Dayton, estimates that there were no
more than a dozen bank robberies in the ENTIRE FRONTIER WEST between 1859 and
1900. (When you’re surrounded by honest
bank customers wearing six-guns, only the stupidest crook would risk a
robbery.)
How about homicides?
What about all those famous cattle towns, filled with cowboys flush with
cash from the cattle drives and “all likkered-up?” Or those quick-draw shootouts on Main
Street? Well, as much as the young men
of the Old West may have been attracted to the romantic notion of settling
their differences like European gentlemen (i.e., blasting away at each other at
a distance of 20 paces), the hard-won common sense of the working-man seems to
have prevailed. Professor Richard Shenkman
of George Mason University found that even notorious Dodge City had suffered
only 5 homicides in its WORST year, 1878.
Homicide rates were similarly low in other Western cities & towns.
It seems that author Robert Heinlein was right when he said,
“an armed society is a polite society.”
So why did I say that when Europeans remark that the modern
USA is “like the Wild West,” they are right, but not for the reasons they
think? Well, with the liberalization of concealed
carry permit laws, the USA now has the highest rate of private gun ownership in
20 years. In that same 20 years, our violent
crime rate has been falling steadily. According
to the most recent United Nations International Crime Study, the USA ranks only
12th in violent crime, out of 15 advanced countries, safer than such
countries as England, New Zealand, Denmark and Switzerland.
Perhaps the typical American mugger or
liquor-store-holdup-man is like those bank robbers in the Old West—only the
really stupid ones would think of committing a crime where honest citizens are
armed.
At this point, some of you may be thinking, “Aha! But what
about all those murders in America? The
homicide rate is much higher than in Europe!”
Unlike other violent crimes, homicide seems to be
culturally-driven rather than economically driven. Some cultures seem to prefer murder as a tool
for dealing with social situations!
Take, for instance, “honor killings;” in some cultures, it’s perfectly
acceptable to murder your own daughter because she was the victim of rape. In others it’s customary to murder a widow
after her husband dies.
This is not the case with, say, European or Japanese
culture, and we find that, in the USA, people of European or Japanese descent
commit murder at about the same low rate as their cousins in Europe or Japan. (Note that the vast majority of inhabitants
of the Old West were of European descent.)
We are probably the most culturally diverse nation in
existence; the idea of a single homicide rate in the USA is about as
meaningless as a single homicide rate for Planet Earth.
