Gun Regulation is Not a New Phenomenon
An excerpt from American Carnage: Shattering the Myths That Fuel Gun Violence
By: Thomas Gabor and Fred Guttenberg
Today’s feature is an excerpt from the new book, American Carnage, a mythbusting tour de force by Fred Guttenberg and Thomas Gabor. The book provides an in-depth examination of dozens of myths that when combined constitute the gun lobby's Firehose of Falsehood. Dismantling these myths is essential to reducing gun violence.
Myth 1: Gun Laws Are a Recent Development
There is a general belief that little gun regulation existed throughout American history and that laws regulating guns are a recent development. Western movies were likely influential in creating the impression that the frontier was full of gun-toting men who were ready to draw their guns at the slightest provocation. This view of the U.S. frontier paves the way for those advocating the expansion of gun rights to argue that laws allowing people to carry guns openly in public settings such as bars, colleges, and government buildings are only returning us to the norms that existed throughout American history.
Fact Check:
The belief that gun laws did not exist in the early years of the republic, or that they were very lax, is patently false. Historians tell us, for example, that contrary to Hollywood depictions, the Old West had low rates of violence and many gun ordinances prohibited gun carrying in towns and inside bars.
Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), has written that gun regulation in frontier towns was quite strict. In notorious Dodge City, Kansas, for example, people were required to turn in their guns when they entered the town.
Contrary to the mythology of violence-ridden Western towns beset by shootouts, an average of just one to two murders per year occurred in Dodge City during the cattle era.18
Winkler also notes that the epic gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, occurred when lawman Wyatt Earp and his brothers tried to enforce a gun ordinance by disarming a semi-outlaw group called the Cowboys.
Ray Allen Billington, a historian specializing in the study of the American frontier and the West, notes that businesspeople and other leaders in Western cattle towns were quick to establish local police forces and to enforce prohibitions against carrying guns. Disarmament was routinely practiced in newly established Western towns and was generally understood as a means of improving public safety. According to Billington, the shootouts glorified in countless books and movies were “unheard of.”19
Professor Winkler of UCLA adds that the Revolutionary Era was marked by strict gun laws by which all free men were mandated to acquire militarily useful firearms and to attend periodic gatherings (musters), during which the guns were inspected and recorded by officials — an early type of gun registration.20 In some states (e.g., New Hampshire), officials conducted door-to-door inventories of guns available in the community, and the states could seize guns if they were needed for military purposes. Gun regulation was also prevalent in the South, a region with some of the most restrictive gun laws in the nineteenth century. These laws were designed to prevent gunfights and to disarm Black people following the Civil War. Laws banning the carrying of concealed weapons were widespread and generally believed to be an essential part of preventing violence.21
Therefore, contrary to a prevalent belief, gun regulation is not a twentieth century phenomenon.
Political scientist Robert Spitzer notes: “…[T]hough gun possession is as old as America, so too are gun laws. But there’s more: gun laws were not only ubiquitous, numbering in the thousands, but also spanned every conceivable category of regulation, from gun acquisition, sale, possession, transport, and use, including deprivation of use through outright confiscation, to hunting and recreational regulations, to registration and express gun bans.”22
As early as 1686, New Jersey prohibited wearing weapons because they were said to induce “great Fear and Quarrels.” Alabama’s 1839 law banning the carrying of concealed weapons was titled, “An Act to Suppress the Evil Practice of Carrying Weapons Secretly.” Furthermore, by the early 1900s, over forty states outlawed or restricted gun carrying due to rising violence. Spitzer asks about the current trend toward more gun carrying: “Why must we relearn a lesson we codified centuries ago? How dumb are we?”23
Thomas Gabor is a Canadian criminologist and former professor of criminology at the University of Ottawa; after losing his daughter in the 2018 Parkland shooting, Fred Guttenberg has become a major GVP activist via his Orange Ribbons For Jaime organization.