Old fashion gun shoot outs numbers

Red Robster January 16, 2014 at 11:25 am

http://www.gunrightsmedia.com/showthread.php?414309-Death-Toll-in-the-Old-West-from-firearms-vs-the-unarmed-East
November 25th, 2009, 02:47 PM #7
csmkersh
“In his book, Frontier Violence: Another Look, author W. Eugene Hollon, provides us with these astonishing facts:

In Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, and Caldwell, for the years from 1870 to 1885, there were only 45 total homicides. This equates to a rate of approximately 1 murder per 100,000 residents per year.

In Abilene, supposedly one of the wildest of the cow towns, not a single person was killed in 1869 or 1870.

Zooming forward over a century to 2007, a quick look at Uniform Crime Report statistics as shown in Table 6, shows the following regarding the aforementioned gun control “paradise” cities of the east and our home town:

DC – 183 Murders (31 per 100,000 residents)
New York – 496 Murders (6 per 100,000 residents)
Baltimore – 282 Murders (45 per 100,000 residents)
Newark – 104 Murders (37 per 100,000 residents)
San Antonio – 122 Murders (9.3 per 100,000 residents)

It doesn’t take an advanced degree in statistics to see that a return to “wild west” levels of violent crime would be a huge improvement for the residents of these cities.”

just something i found.

JPTravis January 16, 2014 at 11:42 am

I wouldn’t put too much faith in those stats. People in Abilene and Dodge City in the 19th century were not bureaucrats and bean counters like modern Americans. Who knows what they considered a homicide? Who knows what percentage of homicides they bothered to document? I’m currently “translating” for publication a diary from a Missouri cavalryman in the 1840s and I cannot begin to explain all the various ways that this English-speaking American’s world was different from mine. Those differences make it difficult for me to interpret what he’s saying about even mundane things. For God’s sake I was 1/4 into the project before I even realized he was in Kansas, not Missouri, because at that time Missouri was a territory that encompassed the area which later became the state of Kansas.

I’m not saying people were being shot every day in Dodge City, but I’m guessing if two rival cattle drives shot it out in the street over something, and the wounded then retired to their respective camps to die in private, the Dodge City marshal wouldn’t bother with it – not his problem.