Capital Gazette Chicago Sun-Times Myth Of Guns NRA
courtesy suntimes.com and Getty

“We do know this: Our nation suffers from a historical myth that guns won the West and, to this day, keep us safe and free. In truth, farmers, cowboys, gold diggers, merchants, school teachers, railroad barons and all the others who settled this country (Native Americans would take exception to the word “win.”) — hardly ever picked up a gun or fired a shot except to hunt.

“The glory of the gun is largely the stuff of Hollywood, promoted by the likes of the NRA to make money off human suffering.” – Chicago Sun-Times Editorial Board in At the Capital Gazette, the gun violence we report on hits home [via suntimes.com]

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

114 COMMENTS

    • Spoken like a group of highly educated fools who have no idea what they’re talking about. Moreover, had America’s birth been dependent on their courage and initiative, we’d be subjects of Queen Elizabeth today.

      • “Spoken like a group of highly educated fools who have no idea what they’re talking about.”

        They know *EXACTLY* what they are talking about. Let me explain –

        Over the past few years, there have been a number of articles, books, ect. put out about how the the west was not ‘Won with the Gun’, how that was all a marketing campaign… Wait for it… By the gun companies… Wait a bit more…

        To sell more guns. (Sound familiar?) Now, why???

        They are laying a fabricated, false ‘history’ they can point to as ‘evidence’, ‘proof’, that America was not “Founded with and the Western US won with guns.”

        Don’t laugh at them. They are *deadly* serious about pushing this narrative, with the plan that when a Progressive SCOTUS is finally seated, they can gut the 2A once and for all.

        I sure hope Justice Thomas is aware of this when he crafts his opinion finally giving “the 2A the respect it deserves” in the (hopefully) near future.

        There *is* something our side can do about this – Our own writers need to be cranking out researched histories, people putting the legwork digging into old newspapers, etc, and countering this crap…

        • To put a finer point on your comment, Obama sat, from 1994 through 2002, on the Board of the Joyce Foundation. This foundation has spent over $50 million dollars on “grants” supporting gun control pablum. Much of this went to “legal scholars” to publish articles in “legal journals” refuting 2A as an individual right. This was done PRECISELY with the intention of giving anti-2A SCOTUS members “ammunition” in the event 2A cases made their way before the court.
          As to Thomas, you needn’t worry that he’ll fall into this honey trap (WAY to intelligent). However, expect to see Ginsburg, Breyer & Co, run straight for the above mentioned garbage when, in the next few years(?) SCOTUS begins to again hear 2A cases.
          This is precisely why POTG MUST remember that progressives play the Long Game (nearly a century now in the US alone- over a century in Europe). This is why we can NEVER rest. We can NEVER sleep.
          Eternal vigilance, POTG.

        • it’s just a deliberate campaign of misinformation…something they routinely do…it’s not directed at the knowledgeable but rather the ill-informed….

        • ALL VERY TRUE ! BUT All The PPL Gathering this info HAVE 2 Band Together & Fight The LIBERAL LIES just as loud & constantly as they do! But WE Have the Edge by knowing what what we R talking about ! & Jump Down Thier Throats when they LIE big time! Such as 1000 bullets a MIN. AND MAKE THEM PAY 4 Thier Body Guards. I Don,t Want MY $$$ going 2 Protect Thier SLEEZY A$$! And Instead of PI$$ & MOAN Get ( ( EVERYMEMBER of ALL Gun Clubs & GUN OWNERS OUT 2 VOTE ! OR U CAN,t B A MEMBER !!!))

      • The one thing they won’t talk about—the thing they can’t talk about—is how the 2nd Amendment was essentially envisioned as a power-sharing tool intended to provide the American body politic with the guaranteed ability to offset or, if necessary, directly challenge the establishment of a tyrannical government. That armed citizens might not have effectively used weapons to aid in their western migration is an ephemeral complaint that doesn’t really relate to why the 2nd Amendment exists. Pretty typical libtard twaddle.

        • “Pretty typical libtard twaddle.”

          It’s not twaddle, Garrison.

          They want us to laugh at it, make fun of it, ignore it.

          At our peril. They are *planning* to use those lies against us.

          “A lie makes itself twice around the world before the truth gets out of bed…”

        • The Bill of Rights doesn’t provide anything. It states what exists and is obvious to anyone with a brain. As in God Given and natural.

          The Amendments since are a mixed bag of this and that.

        • Well, reading this article & thread of comments in 2022, I would have to say this comment has certainly aged well.

    • slum-times: why don’t you report on the predominant race of both the shooting suspects & victims in shi*-congo, the neighborhoods where virtually all shootings occur, and the “gun control” political party that determines whether people can defend themselves or not? maybe you would rather be in london under current muslim khan, since your previous muslim left office in the us.

    • It is correct. The West was a fairly peaceful place. The big cities on the east coast were much more violent.
      But here’s the thing the author doesn’t get: people in the West had lots of guns and there wasn’t blood in the streets.

      • The mining towns were pretty rough, and lots of payrolls were plundered. Train robbery was a thing, or at least Jesse James thought so. Plus there were Indian Wars and Indian raids on settlers, followed by settler or Army raids on Indians. Tombstone didn’t ban guns because it was the social justice thing to do, but because the Cowboys were a gang of horse thieves and plunderers, plus drunken idiots liked to shoot their guns in the air. Yes, most places due to their remoteness, were peaceful, but populated towns not so much.

        • This right here, the West was “peaceful” due mostly to sparse populations. However, the area was still extremely remote and rugged. One didn’t faff about unarmed, EVERYONE was strapped or had a shooter close by. Displaced Indians, criminal gangs, and even drunk rough and tumble laborers made the possibility of violent confrontation a daily reality. Not to mention even that there was actually dangerous fauna about in much higher numbers then due to lower human footprint.

      • And in the west, if you lied and slandered someone’s name it could cost your life.

  2. Try telling the hundreds of thousands of people who use guns in self defense each year that their actions are mythical. Oh wait, the journalists already tell us that.

    • Apparently the ethnic cleansing of Americans didn’t happen, just a bunch of buffaloes were killed, according to the always honest corporate media. They magically all got sick and died of some unknown disease as they personally decided to force themselves to live in an unproductive area they did not come from.

      Don’t believe the NRA’s fictional history books because the Sunny 31bullets media outlet (that wants to ban guns) says it’s untrue.

      • Well, it is true that more Indians were killed by diseases brought by white men to the “New World” for which the Indians had no natural immunities than were killed in all of the various wars over 200 years. Small pox was a huge killer, and there were more than one cases where the Indians were intentionally exposed through contaminated blankets.

        • The Small Pox blanket story is a hoax. It wasn’t until about the time of Louis Pasteur in the late 1870s that germ theory began to be accepted as the cause of disease.

      • The buffalo mostly died from all the evil, toxic lead bullets laying about on the plains and the greenhouse gasses produced from the settlers wagon stock. Sarc

  3. The less the press cares about my freedom the less I care about the freedom of the press.

    • It’s not the Chicago Sun-Times they’ll go after if we lose our freedom of the press. It will be the media that doesn’t tow the party line.

        • Blacklisted news for another. I tried posting a bunch of links but the site wouldn’t let me.

        • And no sooner do I mention that the links wouldn’t post… and then they do. What a co-incidence.

        • Kenneth, you didn’t notice when you posted that ‘bunch of links’ it said ‘This post awaiting moderation’.

          It does that to a bunch of links because they have had recent problems with spam bots trying to flood TTAG.

          TTAG’s able management saw your post wasn’t spam, and it showed up…

        • Geoff:
          It had showed up… but now its gone again. Typical. Most sites do not allow such links. Truth is too controversial.

        • Kenneth, I assume then that you will not grace the pages of such a truth-hating publication any more.
          I’m not asking you to leave, I’m just thinking that if you consider TTAG in such a fashion (“It had showed up… but now its gone again. Typical. Most sites do not allow such links. Truth is too controversial.”), you won’t waste your time here, and instead spend your time on sites that appreciate the truth.

        • Bill: “instead spend your time on sites that appreciate the truth.”
          There is no such site. Truth is censored everywhere. In case you didn’t put two and two together( or you did but got five), I will not be following your advice. Thanks for the effort, though.
          “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” -Anon, but often attributed to Orwell

        • Meanwhile just do searches for: canadian free press, techdirt, gatewy pundt (a site hugely censored, along with vets tody) but the cryptic spellings will save the content. Figure out the spellings while searching, or use duckduckgo or goodgopher instead of google.
          They can’t stop the signal. The censors can only make it difficult.

    • “The less the press cares about my freedom the less I care about the freedom of the press.”

      It’s a long game they are playing, Serge. A classic Leftist mis-information campaign they can point to as “proof”.

      “Tell a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.”

      Sound familiar?

      We had better not ignore it, we had better care about it…

      • Which is why I don’t feel particularly bad when something happens to the left wing “press”… Quite frankly, they have it coming.

  4. Hardly anyone ever picks up a fire extinguisher to put out a fire either, but if your kitchen’s on fire you’ll be glad you have one.

    • Exactly. If your child is swimming and starts to drown , do not throw your child a life jacket or flotation device : tools that will save your child’s life !! Are the media friggin kidding me , us , some of the said farmers , merchants , etc were in the fight to win this country & guess what , they did not do it with broomsticks. They did it with guns !! Get your fucking facts straight , sun times.

      • And they wanted to make sure Americans didn’t keep and bear guns so they could establish their tyranny. Then to maintain their tyranny they made sure Africans couldn’t get guns even if they did help kill Americans. In other words, Europeans/whites used “gun control” to help create an ethno-state for Europeans in a continent that was full of people who came from Asia a very long time ago.

        Still to this day white people are advocating for the disarmament of current day Americans in order to maintain their control over the land. Luckily for minorities some white people no longer think that way. So now the white supremacists are demonizing those civilized white people in order to make their voices ineffective.

        • Yep. The reality is that the greatest population in this country is about 75% white. So depending on which ideology one believes, freedom for all or being a supremacist/racist; the greatest percentage of either group will generally be white.

          The greatest concentration of white supremacists/racists of which you speak are historically and currently of the democrat party. The white progressives/marxists that promote gun confiscation so that the various victim groups that the progressives promote, based on race, gender and sexual preference, will have to look to their demi-god government to provide protection for their imagined oppression by the “White patriarchy”.

          So of course, the progressives will attack the other primarily white group that promotes real freedom, empowerment and self responsibility for all, regardless of race, gender or sexual preference. That would be generally the classical liberal; or the christian/conservative that supports gun rights for all law abiding citizens and looks to the content of ones character and not the color of ones skin.

      • “& guess what , they did not do it with broomsticks. They did it with guns !!”

        Shoulda read:

        & guess what , they did not do it with broomsticks. They did it with BOOMSTICKS !!

        Missed opportunity.

  5. The vast majority of people now, and as probably in the old west, live their whole lives without someone trying to kill them. But do you want to be defenseless if you find yourself in that extremely rare predicament?

  6. And yet. No out cry on Motor Vehicles Weapons Deaths. DUI DWI texting and driving. Ban all Motor Vehicle Weapons.

  7. “The glory of the gun is largely the stuff of Hollywood…” You mean rabidly, anti-gun Hollywood? You mean take your money, lying, hypocritical Hollywood?

  8. Now they’re worried about Hollywood perpetuating falsehoods.
    Silencers, though, are silent tools of assassins and the West was soaked in blood.

  9. Well, this cinches it. An editorial from a newspaper in an ultra-violent liberal dystopia is telling me that guns are bad. I’m woke.

  10. Suuurrrrrreeeeee…… Okay partner riddle me this. When the Comanche, Apache, Sioux, et al attacked settlers however did they defend themselves?

    When the British marched to capture our armories and were met at Lexington and Concord how did we ever stop them?

    When the British invaded our fledgling country in 1812 how did we send them back to Canada?

    How did we defeat the axis forces in World War Two?

    I’ll go head an answer for you because we both know your answer will completely dodge the subject.
    We didn’t settle the west with fair trade, fair treaties, and love ins, we settled it by decimating the “savage natives” and breaking our word to them numerous times. I agree it wasn’t fair but that’s just how things were handled back then.

    We didn’t win independence by talking to Britain’s king and we didn’t win it with a regular army. We won it with few regulars and a rag tag band of hunters, trappers, indian fighters, Indians, French men, and freed men that were very skilled with their rifles and fought “ungentlemanly” according to the British.

    We pushed the British back into Canada not by treaties or by negotiation but by decimating their forces again with our own irregulars armed with, you guessed it, guns.

    We defeated the Nazis, the Japanese, and the Italians while arming the rest of the free world with our guns or American made copies of their guns.

    Say whatever you want sir but the simple fact of the matter is guns have played a huge part in the foundation, formation, and continuation of our nation. All of our freedoms today, including your freedom to be a socialist jack off, comes from those simple farmers that finally got sick of King George’s shit and decided he needed his ass kicked. So they grabbed their Kentucky Long Rifles and started picking off redcoat officers and sniping British columns. Everything you have today, every single freedom in this country, and every country in Europe not named Germany owes their very existence to a gun in an American’s hands.

    • When the British invaded our country in 1814 they pretty much kick our ass. When we invaded Canada in 1812-13 the British and the Canadians kicked our ass. At Plattsburg in 1814, the professional Navy won the Battle on the Lake but had the British pushed on from the flank abandoned when the Militia ran away they would have kicked our ass. We actually only won the Battle of New Orleans. Without Jean Lafette’s cannoneers the British would have kicked our ass. The sole winner of the War 1812-2814 were the Canadians. Our invasion unified the French and English settlers.

      • Arguably, the War of 1812 was won by American privateers who used well armed, fast, private warships to do such damage to the British merchant shipping industry that it created political pressure to end the war.

    • Well said sir. Freedom has never been free , it was earned with blood , spilled by true patriots !! Do not take your freedom for granted.

    • “How did we defeat the axis forces in World War Two?”

      Rolled right over the top of Italy. Let the Russians take the major casualties and do the brunt of the heavy lifting with the Germans. Bombed da’ f*ck outta Japan.

      • Don’t forget we put major expense and effort into keeping the failing Chinese into the war. Propping china up meant that the japanese had to keep a million man army tied down there that could have been used against us in other areas.

        How did America do so well in ww2? We were smarter and more ruthless than the other guys. Let Russians and Chinese soak up bullets.

      • “How did we defeat the axis forces in World War Two?”

        We fed and armed the Russian cannon fodder who bleed the Germans (and themselves) dry. We fed and armed the Brits and showed them how to fight a modern mechanized war (after we figured it out). While wasting vast treasure and manpower on the useless fiction of high altitude strategic bombing.

        • High altitude strategic bombing achieved one thing for a certainty. It destroyed the Luftwaffe’s fighter wings and their best pilots. There’s a reason that after june 6 the germans operated almost entirely without air cover.

          Every time large formations of bombers hit german territory the Luftwaffe came out to meet them. Historians still argue about the damage that strategic bombing did. Disrupting oil flow and trains. Damage to war production. There’s a lot of controversy around the absolute effect. But nobody can argue that the Luftwaffe was rendered ineffective by the losses sustained in fighting the bomber war.

    • “When the British marched to capture our armories and were met at Lexington and Concord how did we ever stop them?”

      No, Moltar.

      They don’t deny *that* history happened.

      They deny the POST Civil War history that “Guns won the West” was a marketing ploy by companies like Winchester with the intent Of SELLING MORE GUNS.

      Now, who is it that complains bitterly the gun companies are only out to sell more guns?

      The LEFTISTS…

      • I could’ve swore that was how capitalism works….. Geoff makes widget A. Geoff sells bunches of widget A. Geoff then starts advertising to sell more of widget A. Geoff repeats profits are made and he eventually retires to his private island some where in the south pacific with his every need being catered to by a trophy girlfriend half his age and a number of young topless island attendants.

  11. ” farmers, cowboys, gold diggers, merchants, school teachers, railroad barons and all the others who settled this country … hardly ever picked up a gun or fired a shot except to hunt.”

    Partially true! But they ALL had guns, carried guns, or hired people with guns to protect them. And the fact that they rarely had to be used for defensive purposes is testament to their immeasurable value.

    • Many well documented instances of towns folk grabbing rifles from hardware stores to fight off and savage the gangs attempting to rob the banks. Law enforcement had little to do with the Dalton gang when they attempted to rob two banks at once. The James /Younger gang tried robbing the Springfield bank and were shot up by local town people. Average folks will rise up when the need arises.

  12. The MYTH that communism hasn’t been tried before, and that it’s POS (D) possessed by it, and who are also shameless purveyors of it, shouldn’t be hunted before they get your guns, in order to do tyranny with impunity.

  13. “it’s better to be vaguely right then precisely wrong.” This article is precisely wrong.

    The West was rural and small town. Rural area were then and are now peaceful places. Crime was just as much an urban problem in the 19th Century as it is today. Places of low population density don’t provide many opportunities for a professional criminal to make money and they lack the anonymity of a dense urban environment. People know the local bad actors can easily identify strangers.

    There was no Wild West, but there was a Wild East. The urban centers of the East, Midwest and Pacific Coast were far dangerous then the frontier.

    • “it’s better to be vaguely right then precisely wrong.”
      in that order? or did they mean than?

      • I think our guy meant “than,” but “then” works too. Being vaguely right then completely wrong just happens to be the way the leftist progs actually do work.

    • You could say the reason people left the east coast for the west coast is the same reason people are leaving the west coast for middle America.

      What happens when middle America becomes just like the coasts that surround them? They say that it won’t take more than a few decades for that to happen.

  15. Well seeing as how this came from a chicago newspaper, i would say it invalidates itself.
    As i am also half native american, i take exception to you talking about us.

      • Came back up this weekend to chicago to finish moving all our stuff to TN. It is hotter in chicago then TN. I might be going to hochunk to cool off.

    • So Ironhead, I have to be American Indian,(whole or in part) to talk about the American Indian history? No, that’s just progressive “cultural appropriation” mind control propaganda. Don’t fall for such nonsense. (Oh, and if any person, regardless of race, is born in a country, makes them a “native” of that country. Since I, primarily of caucasian descent, was born in the USA, I to, by definition, am a native american.)

      • You’re right, and he’s right also.

        Those of us with an ethnic origin that the progs think makes us automagically oppressed might as well turn it to good use against the enemies of freedom whenever we can.

        And at this point, we’re all as native as any American really can be. 98% of us come from ancestors who migrated here after Columbus landed; if we can’t be considered native, then there are really no Americans in America at all.

        • My dad is full blooded Cherokee. My mom was born in Poland and immigrated here with her family when she was 3.
          My statement was a bit fatuous and stupid, as it was typed before coffee. I trying state you dont know what a native american thinks, cause you didnt ask. Not that im more american than anyone else.

        • Understood. No worries. I didn’t word my reply very well.

          That’s actually kind of what I meant — since you can call yourself Native American by their criteria, you might as well remind the progs that the people they presume to speak for may not need or want their kind of “help.” (Not that they’d listen to you, but you might have a better shot than I would.)

          And Thomas R. is right also, in that Native American as a term sets up a nonsensical game of natives vs. invaders; that ship sailed more than 300 yrs ago. I’m 100% western European by ethnicity (as far as I know, anyway) but I’m as native to America as you are or anyone else can be. America doesn’t really care where your ancestors came from.

  16. Well, if I don’t grade on a curve, it’s not that free. I work about half the year for the government. Also, some states don’t have a right to keep and bear arms any more than most European countries. 4th and 5th amendment gone.

  17. Chiraq Sun Times huh?!? Close to folding up their tent. Like most dead tree pulps circulation way down from 1000000 to under 120000.Bury your worthless rag already… the local TV “news” is just as bad or worse. Sigh and its HOT. Wild west hot…

  19. I don’t trust people who either don’t know the proper word for miners or thinks “gold diggers” won the west.

  20. “Native Americans would take exception to the word “win.”

    The losers often do… should’ve fought harder p*ssies.

    • Thanks to gun control, immoral warfare and broken promises/laws Europeans “won.”

      It’s kind of shocking to hear Euros gloat about not being able to keep their word or fight by their own rules. It’s funny when I see them complain about the current situation in South Africa. That karma…

      If you continue your silly glorification of obvious immoral acts and supremacy, you will be replaced sooner than you think and you won’t be able to say anything while that happens. The National Socialists of America [alt-right] won’t be able to stop it.

      Remember you didn’t do anything to create the U.S. and your ancestors probably didn’t do anything either. If your family did partake you should confess and repent in order to improve yourself and the country; because we know sore-winners become sore-losers. If your family didn’t do anything don’t take credit for someone else’s work; that can be a pathetic thing to do.

      • I don’t buy the idea that I have anything to confess or repent for. I don’t believe in the idea of collective guilt or in being held liable for mistakes other people made before I was born.

        Moreover, my direct ancestors DID help to create America, and if anything, I owe them an apology for not doing a better job upholding their legacy.

      • “Thanks to gun control, immoral warfare and broken promises/laws Europeans “won.””

        While there are elements of truth to this, it is also not the entire truth. The fact was that for many of the indigenous tribes, they were more focused on blood feuds with competing tribes than on uniting against what ultimately would be their common enemy, the Europeans. So the early European immigrants, that would ultimately become the US of A, would ally with one tribe against another tribe, defeat the one tribe, then turn around and force their former ally onto a reservation. Not honorable or fair, but not something that I take personal responsibility for, nor any need to apologize to anyone about. But they are the lesson of what happens when the tribe is more important than the individual. This is the nightmare of “multi-culturalism”, or Balkanization, which inevitably leads to inter-tribal warfare.

        ” If you continue your silly glorification of obvious immoral acts and supremacy, you will be replaced sooner than you think and you won’t be able to say anything while that happens. The National Socialists of America [alt-right] won’t be able to stop it.”

        The threat that we are faced with the alt-right that focuses on socialist based white identity(tribal) politics is the same threat of the progressive left that are focused on socialist race/gender/sexuality based identity(tribal) politics; they both threaten the supreme and unique idea that is the basis of the American vision. That vision is that it is the individual that is supreme, and that all laws are based upon the supremacy of the individual, based on individual actions, and not on some kind of collective (tribal)action or of some kind of collective (tribal)guilt. and that the government is there to enforce the contracts between consenting adults, and not the enforcer of some “Social Justice Utopia”.

        So don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees. The enemy we need to be aware of is those from the right or the left that threaten our individual liberties, by trying to balkanize us so we no longer see all of us as just plain non-hyphenated americans.

    • They fought damn hard. They just weren’t equipped to win in the end. There weren’t enough of them, and their way of life was too easily disrupted by the European settlers (or colonists or invaders, if you prefer).

      I think the only people who would quibble with the idea that the American Indians lost the colonization contest are working for the Chicago Scum-Slimes.

      • “Colonists or invaders”? Which ones are speaking of? The colonizing tribes that came across the Siberian land bridge in successive waves over thousands of years or the colonizing Europeans?

        Everybody in the americas were colonists, and depending on who was there first, would be looked at as invaders. And the only thing that kept one tribe from moving a competing tribe out of a better hunting ground was who was the better or more savage fighters. The common cultural meme was that called the Retributive Culture. One tribe messes with another tribe, they pay back retribution at a more savage level. And they were raiding each other for pillage, plunder, women, childen and slaves long before the europeans ever got to these shores.

        Think of the first pilgrims as moving into the territories controlled by the Hells Angels, the Banditos, the Crips, the Bloods or the Mexican or the Russian mafia’s. The Americas upon the arrival of the Europeans was closer to “Mad Max” than to “Father Knows Best”.

        • Which invaders? The most recent ones: us.

          True, the history of humanity is basically a timeless series of cultural conflicts and invasions of territory. American Indians did that to each other constantly on a mostly tribal scale, the same way various groups of humans have been doing it to each other everywhere since humanity began.

          Where you’ve gone wrong is that the American Indians didn’t need outsiders to “fix” their culture, nor were they horrible people that deserved to be invaded and destroyed. That’s almost as wrong as the progressive/left thinking that Western culture is uniquely evil simply because its people moved around the globe and squashed or displaced other cultures in the past.

        • Well ING, saying that many of the Indian Tribes didn’t need to be “fixed” is quite…… delusional. Many of the tribes were raiders. They would raid, rape, pillage and plunder, taking women and kids to trade as slaves and many of the tribes that took adult male captives would torture them to death in the most horrible and painful ways.

          It’s like you were saying the natural raiding cultures of Genghis Khan and Atila the Hun was just fine and didn’t need to change.

          Not all tribes were raiders, like the Pueblo people’s of New Mexico. But the raider cultures of the Navajo, the Apache, the Comanche and the Souix were savage, brutal and definitely needed to be “fixed”. One of the biggest complaints from the Pueblo people’s towards the Spanish, once they had taken control of what would become New Mexico, was that the Spanish weren’t effective in protecting the Pueblos from being raided by the Navajo, the Apache and the Comanche.

  21. In highschool, I saw a museum had a display of items settlers carried in their Conestoga wagons for the trip to California with the price tags of the time.
    Revolver cost more than plains rifles in the 1850’s and places like San Francisco had handgun bans to prevent drunken shootouts.

    I will correct the authors:
    Revolvers in the old West were few, unlike cowboy movies where everyone packs a revolver; most people were farmers and had plains rifles to hunt and defend their claims.

  23. They are saying right there in the article thst these peoole had a firearm in their hands nearly every day to put meat on the table.

  24. The Old West was peaceful because it had plenty of guns but didn’t have the Fake News Media stirring up sh!t.

    So instead of outlawing guns, maybe we should outlaw Jim Acosta.

  25. The police bear no obligation to protect the individual. Given this, I choose to be armed. It’s really as simple as that.

  26. What a ******* pivot. Man, like a world class figure skater. Unable to peddle assault weapon ban malarkey in the wake of Annapolis, they reach for a related shibboleth.

    By the way, why don’t you bounce that “guns don’t keep us free” stuff off of the Warsaw ghetto Jews or the victims of Pol Pot. Oh, that’s right, you can’t.

  27. I wasn’t exactly “Lawless” either! A provision for Statehood, was the ability to keep that “Territories” Citizens Safe, and not just from the Indians. Tombstone, Arizona had a City Ordinance (i.e. Ordinance Number Nine) which banned Firearms within City Limits. The Incident at the “O.K. Coral” which got the “McLaury/Clanton Gang” Killed was for Breaking the Law. The OK Coral was within the Limits of the City of Tombstone…

  29. This is just 1 more article minimizing the 2A. We all know why the 2A was written – to protect us against a totalitarian govt.
    It always gets me is how the anti-2A crowd says, theres no way your little ARs could fight off the govt. They have jets and bombs and drones – you wouldnt stand a chance. Yea, right. Tell that to the tens of thousands of Russians who died battling the Afghans, and even our own soldiers fighting in the middle east.
    So, people can write what they want, but we know better.

  30. That this vomit emerged from “The Chi-Commie-Times Office of Propaganda” is all anyone needs to know.

  31. The most effective DGU is the one that does not involve drawing, let alone firing. So, bangs are the wrong thing to count. Indeed, regular folks have guns, so bad folks don’t start nothing, n there won’t be nothin.

    The best thing to measure is all the nothing much that happens. People care defensively to get more of … stuff that doesn’t happen. Not getting killed when the home invaders come. Better, home invaders not coming, because maybe-armed targets are too risky.

  32. Everyone knows that the FBI , CIA and the National Guard kept order during the big land claim days and the California gold rush LOL! Also lots of pioneers hunted for fun on weekends and bought their food at Costco.

    They can only get away with this crap because no one these days has even read Little House in the Big Woods.

    • Come again!/? The FBI didn’t exist before July 1908, the National Guard didn’t exist before June 1916 and the CIA (i.e. OSS) didn’t exist before July 1942…

      • Perhaps the sarcasm escaped you?
        Some folks need to read True West magazine to see how important firearms were during that time period. Either that or due a drug test to see which substances affect their thought processes.

        • Firearms were important in the 19th century, but nobody wanted to died needlessly, especially not by a bullet. When Death by Accident and/or disease were commonplace. And unlike the TV series “Gunsmoke”, few died in actual Street Gunfights (i.e. Duels). And certainly not at ranges that where portrayed on “Bonanza”…

  34. I cannot speak for the Chicago Sun Times so I don’t expect them to be able to speak for me: Guns absolutely provide safety for me and are central to my on-going freedom. They cannot disprove this.

  36. Let’s go back – back to the birth of the nation, to the origin of the ‘myth’: Did George Washington have his troops use their freedom of speech against the British, or did he have those troops SHOOT THEM?

  37. Tell that load of crap to the woman who stopped the car jacker with her two boys in the back seats in child car seats. Shot him in the head.

  38. Bull Shit from people who know little of history. This is why you libtards lost and keep losing. Its not worth the time or effort to educate your stupid ass.

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