LOOOOOOONG POST WARNING
I'm basing what I'm about to say on these six books.
Tombstone and Dodge City by Tom Clavin, The Outlaw Trail by Charles Kelly, Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride by Michael Wallis They Died With There Boots On (A biography of John Wesley Hardin) By Thomas Ripley
And The Cattlemen by Mari Sandoz.
The bottom line is The old west was corrupt as hell. It was basically run by organized crime.
You know how in the old western movies it's always the big Rancher against the small Homesteader? That was essentially true. The big Ranchers held on to their beef monopolies by force. There was a guy in western Nebraska named Print Olive who grew his herd by simply accusing any smaller Rancher of theft of cattle, confiscating their herd and killing them if they resisted. He did that for years with very little resistance before he finally pissed somebody off in a saloon and the guy shot him in the back.
The Johnson County War was really interesting. According to the book The Outlaw Trail the Johnson County war was honest ranchers cleaning out Rustlers. According to The Cattlemen it was big ranchers wiping out smaller Ranchers and confiscating their herds. There were also a couple of instances where the smaller Rancher resisted and the bigger Rancher just showed up at their home with overwhelming numbers and hung everybody in the family including the kids.
There really weren't any civil rights in the Old West. Most of the court systems in the judges were openly corrupt. The Earp Brothers were pimps ( that's where that scene in the movie Tombstone come from in which Ike Clanton calls Virgil and Wyatt pimps) and most of their "wives" (including Josephine Marcus) were prostitutes.
There was also quite a bit of gun control in the Old West (Tombstone City Ordinance Number 9. When Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson were the Marshall and Sheriff of Dodge City people (Drovers) were forbidden to carry firearms north of the Deadline.
The Colt Peacemaker, the gun that won the West, cost about a month's pay back then. Very few people (relatively) carried them.
Almost every time in those six bucks that I read about a gunfight in the Old West it was an ambush and a whole bunch of those guys got shot in the back.
According to sheriff Johnny Behan the clintons and the MC Lowry's had their hands up and were surrendering when the Earps started shooting. I I don't know if I believe that because it makes sense to me if that was true Wyatt would have capped Ike.
So I said all that to say that in my opinion as the police step back from enforcing the law. You're not going to see a bunch of armed citizens stepping up to the plate. You're going to see what you're seeing right now in Seattle and Portland and in downtown Los Angeles and San Francisco. The gangs and the mobs are going to run the towns.
during the lockdowns I saw a bunch of people open carrying in Colorado Springs.
I believe that most of them saw the world going to hell around them and they were part of that big surge of people buying guns and they didn't have a concealed handgun permit so they just carried their guns openly.
What I'm also seeing is every couple days somebody gets shot and it's usually criminal shooting other criminals or drive by as or things like that.
I'm not seeing a lot of good upstanding citizens defending themselves with their handguns.
So, this post is already a book and I'm sorry for that so I'm going to stop it right here.
I just wanted to comment on the idea that it's going to be like the old west and everybody's going to be packing heat and we're going to clean up the town. Cuz that ain't happening.