JSA wrote:
What happened thereafter? Well, we went west. How was the West won? With the Winchester repeater 1873. The gunslingers were legends and a country was made.
When I hear people point to other countries and say, "why can't the US be like them?" I just shake my head. All you have to do is look at our history for an answer to that question.
You'd have to acknowledge that there is a large component of mythology built upon a kernel of truth in characterisations like this (your reference to "legend" is appropriate). People obtain their beliefs about this from bad movies, not from evidence.
There are, at least, a couple of elements. One is the idea that as Europeans moved westward, legal infrastructure lagged behind the settlement frontier, and if you encountered a bad guy on that frontier you might need to take justice into your own hands. There is a little truth in this, for a brief period in some locations. But if you played all the bad movies on this topic end to end it would take longer than that entire period in US history.
The related mythology is around "outlaws" (what we call bushrangers), individuals or gangs of ne'er-do-wells who roamed the landscape raping and pillaging beyond the reach of the law. Again, there have been about 50 movies made for every individual who might actually fit the description, and their actual impact on US rural life was insignificant compared to the mythology later adopted about them.
If you want to discuss this with, say, an Australian, you have to expect us to be a bit underwhelmed. The US west wasn't a harsh, unforgiving landscape as we keep hearing. It was a garden of Eden compared to the Australian west. It was "won" pretty quickly by a massive wave of Europeans with hard work and good farming of plentiful fecund land. The struggles were greater, and the threats more real, for Australian settlers.
BTW, do you know when the last Australian bushranger was brought to justice? After committing rape and murder, and living off the land (sleeping in the bush, feeding on wild animals, raiding remote farms and disappearing before the police came anywhere near) for
7 years, Malcolm Naden was captured in March
2012. This was possible because the Australian wild west actually is wild, and remained so long after the US had paved theirs wall-to-wall so you can strap on your guns to go to Wal-Mart and the all you can eat buffet at Panera.
The conclusion of this "gunslingers made the USA" mythology is the notion that most ordinary Americans had and used guns. That just isn't born out by the evidence. Most studies of 18th & 19th century gun ownership (usually drawn from probate records) show that fewer than 15% of private citizens owned guns. That's lower than today (and it was pretty similar to the Australian rate at the time - we have a rich historical gun culture as well). Guns were pretty expensive, and just not very useful.
The US's current gun culture might be influenced by events of more than two centuries ago, but it owes a lot to far more recent decisions. I come from a gun-toting frontier country (that still has relatively high gun ownership and violence rates) but I'm more interested in future directions and outcomes than in being slave to a (largely imagined) history.