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So, you really want to live in the "wild west" where everyone is packing a gun? Jeez, people aren't careful with their cars, much less everyone with a freakin handgun!
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You make it sound like the wild west was actually wild.
An American Experiment in Anarcho-Capitalism: The Not So Wild, Wild West
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These histories describe the era and area as characterized by gunfights, horse-thievery, and general disrespect for basic human rights. The taste for the dramatic in literature and other entertainment forms has led to concentration on the seeming disparity between the westerners’ desire for order and the prevailing disorder. If the Hollywood image of the West were not enough so taint our view, scholars of violence contributed with quotes such as the following: “We can report with some assurance that compared to frontier days there has been a significant decrease in crimes of violence in the United States.”[11]
Recently, however, more careful examinations of the conditions that existed cause one to doubt the accuracy of this perception. In his book, Frontier Violence. Another Look, W. Eugene Hollon stated that the believed “that the Western frontier was a far more civilized, more peaceful, and safer place than American society is today.” [12] The legend of the “wild, wild West” lives on despite Robert Dykstra’s finding that in five of the major cattle towns (Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, and Caldwell) for the years from 1870 to 1885, only 45 homicides were reported—an average of 1.5 per cattle-trading season.’[13] In Abilene, supposedly one of the wildest of the cow towns, “nobody was killed in 1869 or 1870. In fact, nobody was killed until the advent of officers of the law, employed to prevent killings.” [14] Only two towns, Ellsworth in 1873 and Dodge City in 1876, ever had five killings in any one year. [15] Frank Prassel states in his book subtitled “A Legacy of Law and Order,” that “if any conclusion can he drawn from recent crime statistics, is must be that this last frontier left no significant heritage of offenses against the person, relative to other sections of the country.”
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