Wild West or Galt’s Gulch?

Hollywood has re-created the Old West as a violent free for all, an exciting place to visit vicariously but nowhere you would want to find yourself in real life, lest you get caught up in the gunfire. In reality, the Old West more resembled Ayn Rand’s Galt’s Gulch than the Wild West of the silver screen. Moonbattery.com sponsor Ammo.com presents evidence that the Old West was more peaceful than a modern American city and showcased the effectiveness of libertarianism.

Without Big Government leaning over their shoulder, miners, ranchers, and farmers learned how to work things out for themselves at the local level on a cooperative rather than a coercive basis, respecting each other’s property rights. That is, they were civilized.

The violence was mainly myth. According to historian Richard Shenkman, Dodge City’s frontier era homicide rate topped out at five killings in 1878.

As for robbery,

Larry Schweikart of the University of Dayton also pointed out that the infamous bank robberies that captivate movie audiences were not very frequent. His research uncovered that there were fewer than a dozen bank robberies in the frontier West from 1859 to 1900. In essence, Schweikart argues that there are “more bank robberies in modern-day Dayton, Ohio, in a year than there were in the entire Old West in a decade, perhaps in the entire frontier period.”

Frontier mining towns Aurora, Nevada and Bodie, California had several banks, but none was robbed. Historian Roger McGrath explains why not:

“Most of the bankers were armed, as were their employees, and a robber would have run a considerable risk of being killed.”

In contrast, all a bank robber has to do now is present a note saying give me the money or else, and the bank will probably comply.

Merchants and homeowners were armed too. So criminals left them alone.

McGrath compares the 1980 burglary rate for the USA as a whole to the rate in late 19th century Bodie:

“Bodie’s five-year total of 32 burglaries converts to an average of 6.4 burglaries a year and gives the town a burglary rate of 128 on the FBI scale. … The rate for the United States as a whole was 1,668, or thirteen times that for Bodie.”

Concludes McGrath,

“The citizens themselves, armed with various types of firearms and willing to kill to protect their persons or property, were evidently the most important deterrent to larcenous crime.”

Compare that to modern-day urban dystopias:

[P]rogressive urban centers like Chicago and Washington, D.C. are held up as enlightened cosmopolitan hubs, when in fact, they have witnessed crime sprees in recent decades that were unheard of in other points of American history. These cities are in political jurisdictions that feature stringent gun control…

You would be a lot safer in Dodge City at its wildest than in today’s Chicago, where police are plentiful but back down to the violent gangs that rule the streets. This is because limited government and personal responsibility work, whereas bloated government and authoritarianism do not work.

Read more at Ammo.com, and stock up on discount ammo while you are there.

The post Wild West or Galt’s Gulch? appeared first on Moonbattery.