Was the Wild Wild West the safest place in the US since everyone had a gun back then?

Note the fact that most of these people are down voting the common sense answers while giving thumbs up to anyone that says anything remotely supporting the positive on this one. And people wonder why this country is in such dire straits, the stinking evangelical right seems to have a stranglehold on ignorance, intolerance, and pure idiocy.

If Cracked.com is to be believed,gun control was rampant in the Wild West,especially against revolvers.But the gangs were amazingly huge back then,so no it wasn't the safest place.Gun control actually has nothing to do with how safe a place is.Crime is at a record all time low in the US right now.

The Wild Wild West was a figment of Hollywood's imagination!

Yes it was. Homicide victims in the mining towns of Aurora and Bodie (the most violent towns with the most violent reputations in the "Wild Wild West") were willing participants in many saloon fights on who was the better man, on real or imagined insults, and on the pecking order in the saloon, not innocent victims. Read especially the "Homicide" section of the study "Violence and Lawlessness on the Western Frontier" by Roger D. McGrath, author of the book "Gunfighters, Highwaymen, & Vigilantes: Violence on the Frontier", here:

http://www.guncite.com/wild_west_myth.html

A gun will not save you from cholera. No, people were not safer in the past... half of all children died of disease and malnutrition.

Imagine all of your childhood friends... picture yourself at a birthday party and all their smiling faces as you get ready to blow out the candles... can you see them in your minds eye? Now picture half of them gone. Have a brother or sister? Imagine how your family would have reacted had they died when they were about 7 years old.

Or what if it were you..... cholera is a terrible way to die. Start off with diarrhea and vomiting.... that leads into dehydration and seizures... in the end you are left to weak to move until finally your heart just stops.

A little chlorine and fluoride in the water supply is not such a bad thing after all.

But ok, sure you want to talk about violence... no, you STILL weren't safer. Violence was an everyday occurrence... but shooting each other WASN'T very common because guns were expensive and no... not everyone owned one.

Take Billy the kid for example... his favored weapon, a winchester rifle, cost almost $100 when new.... that's quite allot of money when a GOOD job only paid $10 a week.... 10 weeks pay for a gun. To put that into perspective.... that would be the equivalent of $6000 in today's money. Even a used gun would be too expensive for most people.

Sorry... but I don't like looking at history with rose tinted glasses. Life in the past sucked, winters were cold, summers were hot, the food was bad and unreliable in its availability, medical care was primitive, the majority of people were uneducated and dirty (typically a person would only bathe once a week) and finally alcoholism was rampant.

The Wild Wild West was nothing like how T.V shows it. People didn't even open carry revolvers and saloon shootouts didn't really occur that often.

Would that be the "wild wild west" you saw on TV?

Or reality?

Some places yes, some places no. Most real gunfights happened in saloons or just outside with both players being drunk as skunks.

In a lot of ways it was. There were, of course, tons of drunk young men, so there were episodes of violence, but for the average guy when nobody was on the warpath, it was safer in most of the Wild West than it is in parts of our major cities today, in terms of gun violence, and a LOT safer in terms of other crimes.

Well, if your gun can hold off the claim jumpers and all of their guns you will be. Maybe you should call Clint Eastwood to help you--then you and him can take down that whole gang.