It’s unrelenting. Never ending. With the seating of the New Hampshire Legislature, house rules were returned to where guns were allowed in the state house. And oh how 
the liars and demagogues lined up to have their say. The pablum-puking hoplophobic liberals don’t like it. We get that already. Repeating it, “ad nauseum,” ain’t going to change a thing, folks.
This past Wednesday Concord Businessman Glen Currie opined in the Concord Monitor, “Unfortunately, the new folks in town seem to want us to become the place where Little House on the Prairie hosts the Gunfight at O.K. Corral,” conjuring television and movie images of Tom Mix or John Wayne facing off with some cowboy in a tumbleweed street. Mr. Currie, however, is little more than full of crap…and himself, irrespective of whether he thinks the legislature is a bunch of “wing nuts“[sic].
The unending plethora of references to the New Hampshire Statehouse becoming analogous to the Wild West, the O.K. Coral, Wyatt Earp, and Billy the Kid has now become an annoying cacophony to those of us who have spent considerable time, energy and academic capital studying American History. Despite the multi-disciplinary and long-existing peer-reviewed, scholarly works of contemporary academia, these references manage to hang on like herpes…or a bad penny.
The overlying thesis of Wild West narratives and presentations is that, without government, society becomes disordered and out of control. We need only look to early television shows like Wagon train, Have Gun will Travel, Cheyenne, Bonanza, and the Lone Ranger to see Hollywood’s consistency in their liberal advocacy of a government solution through the lens of television. [insert picture of Mr. Currie in a cowboy suit sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of a 60’s vintage tube TV eating a Swanson Frozen Dinner watching, “The Big Valley.”]
Historians and Hollywood have long overstated the so-called “Wild West.” During the westward expansion period, crime rates were quite low and property rights were reasonably secure, irrespective of the absence of the almighty guiding hand of government. It was people, nor courts, lawyers, or governments who devised the private and non-governmental remedies to resolve issues surrounding land, minerals, water, and personal disputes.
While emerging western society was not absent of corruption or abuse, such was substantially less than comparably felt at the hands of government bureaucrats. Early Western Society did not collapse without the government, but actually thrived and prospered. Murder was not that common, Rape was rare and people treated one another generally with the utmost of respect. In retrospect, there is far more violence today that ever in the history of westward expansion.
Do I expect this brief treatment to silence the hoplophobes and their faux historical references? Nope. But I do hope that more people might consider taking a closer look at the list of peer-reviewed scholarly works I’ve included below so that we all can call out these liberal liars, but do so grounded in historical accuracy and authority.
Anderson, Terry Lee, and Peter Jensen. Hill. The Not so Wild, Wild West: Property
Rights on the Frontier. Stanford, CA: Stanford Economics and Finance,
2004.225-321. Print.
Bellesiles, Michael A. Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American
History. New York: New York UP, 1999. Print.
Dykstra, Robert R. The Cattle Towns.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1983. Print.
Hollon, William E. Frontier Violence: Another Look.
London: Oxford Univ. Pr., 1974. Print.
McGrath, Roger D. Gunfighters, Highwaymen & Vigilantes: Violence on the
Frontier. Berkeley: University of California, 1984. Print.
Woods, Thomas E. 33 Questions about American History You’re Not
Supposed to Ask. New York: Crown Forum, 2007. 44-47. Print.
