Come Saturday Morning: Things Many Think Are True (But Aren’t)

By: Phoenix Woman Saturday August 22, 2009 7:30 am

Things that many Americans, thanks in large part to well-financed conservative myth machines, think are true but which aren't:

-- "The 'Wild West' Didn't Have Gun Control." Oh yes it did:

Pioneer publications show Old West leaders repeatedly arguing in favor of gun control. City leaders in the old cattle towns knew from experience what some Americans today don't want to believe: a town that allows easy access to guns invites trouble.

What these cow-town leaders saw intimately in their day-to-day association with guns is that more guns in more places created not greater security but greater danger in an already dangerous wilderness. By the 1880s many in the West were fed up with gun violence. Gun control, they contended, was absolutely essential, and the remedy advocated usually was usually no less than a total ban on pistol-packing.

The prevalence of gun control in the West is part of what kept it from being anywhere near as wild as the dime-store novelists, writing for Eastern and European audiences, depicted -- depictions that NRA-worshipping conservatives cherish so much that they screamed bloody murder at Clint Eastwood when he dared to show 19th-century Western gun control in his film Unforgiven.