I'm interested to know what the public perception, and actual statistics, of "daily, civilian violence" due to guns was during the post-civil war era and regions commonly understood as "The Old West".
For the sake of framing, I'm not including acts of war or similar by and against native Americans, or Spanish territories, etc. More the day to day of western towns, cowboys, "gunslingers"... Also limited to"The West" so not New York, Chicago, etc.
I'm particularly interested in how this might compare to today and our contemporary understanding and views about gun violence.
The gun violence in towns of the Old West, as depicted by Hollywood, is mostly a myth. In truth, gun fights were a rarity in most small towns, and many of these towns had outlawed gun possession within their boundaries. Thus, few residents ever witnessed a gun fight on their streets, let alone carried sidearms. Even bank robbery was considered a rarity as well, contrary to what was often portrayed on the silver screen.
To put this in perspective, the recorded yearly homicide rate in the latter half of the 19th century for an adult in Dodge City was 0.165 percent (165 per 100,000), whereas in Oregon it was only 0.03 percent (30 per 100,000). Compare this to Washington DC’s homicide rate in 2018 of 0.022 percent (22.78 per 100,000).
While it’s true Dodge City once had a homicide rate over 7 times greater than Washington DC has now; in truth, the actual numbers for Dodge City, with a population in 1880 of 997, were around 1 or 2 homicides per year. It seems small when compared to Washington DC’s 159 recorded homicides for 2018. Even Tombstone, during its most violent period, witnessed on average less than 10 homicides per year.
Therefore, you can see that the homicide rate during the time of the Old West doesn’t correlate with Hollywoods portrayal of the West as being extremely violent. You are more likely to be shot today in Chicago or New York than you would living in Dodge City or Tombstone in the late 1880s.
Dykstra, Robert R. “Quantifying the Wild West: The Problematic Statistics of Frontier Violence.” Western Historical Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2009): 321–47.
Roth, Randolph. “Criminologists and Historians of Crime: A Partnership Well Worth Pursuing.” Crime, History & Societies 21, no. 2 (2017): 387–99.
Randolph Roth, Michael D. Maltz, and Douglas L. Eckberg. “Homicide Rates in the Old West.” Western Historical Quarterly 42, no. 2 (2011): 173–95.