Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell is co-founder of Pushkin Industries and host of the hit podcast Revisionist History. He is a journalist, a speaker, and the author of several New York Times bestsellers including The Tipping…
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The longest running television series of the 20th century was Gunsmoke, a western set in the notorious Dodge City, Kansas. Malcolm sweeps away mountains of legal scholarship to make a bold claim: The simplest explanation for the Supreme’s Court’s puzzling run of gun rights decisions may be that the justices watched too much Gunsmoke when they were growing up.
John Meston
It isn't often that a writer or any man is given an opportunity to destroy a figure he's always hated, a character that all his life has cluttered his landscape like a slum. And to be able to do so and get paid for it to boot is to be doubly blessed.
Malcolm Gladwell
The co-creator of the greatest television Western of all time was a man named John Meston.
John Meston
My hated figure is the Western hero who rides along thumping his guitar, nasally singing a synthetic ballad and looking for all the world like a fugitive from a cheap circus. I spit in his milk and he'll have to go elsewhere to find somebody to pour the lead for his golden bullets. Now, the best way to destroy something bad is to write it down with something better, and I've got a guy I think out classes any of these phony big hats.
Malcolm Gladwell
Meston gave the world Gunsmoke, which ran on CBS for an astounding 20 seasons from 1955 to 1975, one of the most widely watched TV shows ever. When it's run finally ended, the LA Times film critic referred to it as "our own Iliad and Odyssey" only in the place of Odysseus and Achilles, Meston gave us Matt Dillon. Lanky. Iconic. Impossibly brave. One of the great reluctant heroes in television history.
John Meston
His hair is probably red if he's got any left. He'd be handsomer than he is if he had better manners, but life and his enemies had left him looking a little beat up. And I suppose having seen his mother back about 1840, struggling to take a bath in a wooden wash tub without fully undressing left his soul a little warped. Anyway, there'd have to be something wrong with him or he wouldn't have hired on as a United States Marshal in the heyday of Dodge City, Kansas. Dodge at that time was the wildest town in America, and it was populated by men just as warped and more so than Matt Dillon.
Malcolm Gladwell
My name is Malcolm Gladwell, you're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about Westerns and the long shadow they've cast across American life. It's possible you've never thought about Westerns, maybe you've never even seen one, but your parents, and particularly your grandparents most certainly did. In the mid-1950s, Westerns took up a third of all evening television viewing time. If you lived in a major city like New York, you had your choice of 51 different Westerns in a given week. And what were Westerns, well, they were stories about big strong men. The heroes of the top six Westerns of 1962, average six foot four and 210 pounds, white, big strong men.
There wasn't a lot of ethnic variation in the TV Western. There weren't a lot of women or families, even though the reason all those pioneers moved to the Wild West was, of course, to provide a better life for their families. There wasn't a lot of moral ambiguity or introspection or shades of gray. These were action shows, but what was there a lot of, there were a lot of guns.
And in this installment of our series on gun violence, I want to figure out what it means that an entire generation of Americans grew up watching a world in which big strong men shot at each other with guns, in the absence of any kind of cultural or moral or psychological ambiguity.
Our case study Gunsmoke, the greatest of all the TV Westerns, and one episode in particular. Season one, episode eight. Kite's Reward.
Picture a long dusty street, straight out of the old West. Downtown Dodge City. The most infamous of the cattle towns of the 1870's. Long row of ramshackle wooden buildings, bars, stables, general store, cowboys sauntering to and fro. Our hero, Matt Dillon is sitting on a porch talking to his friend, Chester. They spot a man, a stranger lurking around the Long Branch Saloon, then a second stranger, much younger, handsome, blonde approaches on horseback and dismounts.
Chester
Who's that?
Matt Dillon
Never saw him before.
Chester
Some trail hand come to lose his wages.
Matt Dillon
Probably.
Malcolm Gladwell
The blonde man walks into a bar, orders a beer. The older man, the one who had been lurking, follows him in, pulls out his six shooter and says in that biting tone, peculiar to this era of TV villain.
FS
Turn around. Keep your hand away from that gun. I'm going to take your gun.
Andy
No, you're not.
FS
You want to die? Don't matter none to me.
Andy
Then go ahead.
FS
All right.
Malcolm Gladwell
But the young man is much too quick for his foe. He pulls out his revolver in what seems like a heartbeat. His pursuer lies dead on the floor just as the man of the law, Marshall Matt Dillon comes rushing in.
Andy
Self-defense, Marshall, you saw it.
Matt Dillon
I want your gun.
Andy
That ain't right, it was self-defense, pure and simple.
Matt Dillon
I said, I want your gun.
Andy
All right, take it.
Malcolm Gladwell
And Matt Dillon takes his gun away.
Now, let's pause here because this is a hugely significant moment. First thing, maybe an obvious thing. This whole scene is very American. CBS made a Western set in Canada at around the same time. It was about a Mountie named Sergeant Preston who went around saving damsels in distress with the aid of an adorable dog named King. Sergeant Preston never resorted to violence, he relied on his Witt, his courage, and the assistance of his adorable dog King.
How did every episode end? Sergeant Preston turns to King and says, "Well King, this case is closed."
I mean, how Canadian is that? It's one of my greatest regrets that during my Canadian childhood, we didn't have a television in our house, and so I never got a chance to learn of the role large fluffy dogs played in taming the Canadian North.
Oh, but Gunsmoke, that's a different story. Episodes of Gunsmoke did not end with Matt Dillon saying, "Good doggy, good doggy."
Second thing, why do we care so much about Gunsmoke? Because, and this is important, I'm trying to solve a puzzle having to do with the 2022 case of New York State Pistol and Rifle Association v. Bruen. The landmark decision where the Supreme Court ruled that a New York state law restricting handgun licenses was unconstitutional. If you listen to the first episode of this miniseries, which dearly hope you do before you listen to this one, you'll know I have strong feelings about the court's infatuation in that case with a certain disputatious 17th century slave traitor named Sir John Knight.
But here we are concerned with a broader puzzle, it came during oral arguments. Oral arguments are a big deal. Lawyers for both sides gather to present their arguments publicly, before all the assembled justices. Arguments are tested, questions are asked, the whole thing goes on for hours. It's Daniel in the Lion's Den, one lawyer versus nine of the keenest legal minds in the country.
So, November 3, 2021. The solicitor general of the state of New York is up at the front of the palatial hearing room. Barbara Underwood. Serious glasses. Kindly smile. Kind of looks like your grandmother, that is if your grandmother had argued 22 cases before the Supreme Court.
Barbara Underwood
Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court, for centuries English and American law have imposed limits on carrying firearms in public in the interest of public safety.
Malcolm Gladwell
She begins with a detailed explanation of how New York state is justified in not letting anyone carry a handgun who wants to carry a handgun. But then she's interrupted by Samuel Alito, one of the most conservative members of the court and almost certainly the grumpiest.
Samuel A. Alito, Jr.
Could I explore what that means for ordinary law abiding citizens who feel they need to carry a firearm for self-defense? So I want you to think about people like this. People who work late at night in Manhattan might be somebody who cleans offices, might be a doorman at an apartment, might be a nurse, or an orderly, might be somebody who washes dishes. None of these people has a criminal record. They're all law abiding citizens. They get off work around midnight, maybe even after midnight, they have to commute home by subway, maybe by bus. When they arrive at the subway station or the bus stop, they have to walk some distance through a high crime area.
Malcolm Gladwell
They're scared to death, Alito said, so why shouldn't they be allowed to carry a handgun on their subway ride home? Now, it should be pointed out that Barbara Underwood has spent years working in the D.A’s office in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens.
She's a New Yorker, she's familiar with the subway. Alito, meanwhile, is a kid from New Jersey, went to school at Princeton, worked most of his life in the New Jersey suburbs before moving to the Washington DC suburbs. I'm going to guess that most of what he knows about the New York subway is from old Beastie Boys videos that he was trying to stop his kids from watching.
So Underwood says, as any longtime subway rider would say ...
Barbara Underwood
I think the extra problem in Manhattan is that your hypothetical quite appropriately entailed the subways, entailed public transit, and there are lots of people on the subways, even at midnight, as I can say from personal experience and the particular specter of a lot of armed people in an enclosed space-
Samuel A. Alito, Jr.
There are a lot of armed people on the streets of New York and in the subways late at night right now, aren't there?
Barbara Underwood
I don't know that there are a lot of armed people...
Samuel A. Alito, Jr.
No?
Malcolm Gladwell
First thing here, Alito clearly thinks New York City is some kind of modern day Dodge City. It's not, of course, it's one of the safest big cities in the country. The number of gun crimes per capita in New York City is a fraction of what it is in say, Jacksonville, Florida, or New Orleans, or Birmingham, Alabama, or literally dozens and dozens of other American cities.
New York City is an exception to the general tide of violence in the United States, in part because of the law that the Bruen case seeks to overturn, but whatever.
Something about the idea of New York City makes Justice Alito very nervous and he thinks as a result, the prudent course for any late night commuter is to be packing heat. But Underwood knows different. "There are a lot of people on the subway, even at midnight, as I can say from personal experience."
Lawyers work late. Lots and lots of times she's taken the two or the three or the A train back home at night.
She did not find the experience as terrifying as Justice Alito apparently believes it to be. And as he's talking, she's clearly imagining the alternate universe where Alito gets his way.
It's late at night, there's a confrontation at one end of the car. One guy pulls a gun because, per Justice Alito's instructions, he's come prepared for anything untoward happening. In response, the other guy pulls his gun, the two of them start shooting, but of course, they're terrified and they're spraying bullets everywhere because handguns, as even the most devoted gun lover will tell you, are really, really hard to shoot accurately, even under the best of circumstances with people who know what they're doing and practice every day.
And these are not the best of circumstances, and these are not people who practice every day. They are in Justice Alito's hypothetical: doormen, nurses, and dishwashers. People who have worked long hard days and are exhausted, and have kids at home, and don't exactly have the time to drive to a shooting range every weekend and fire through 200 rounds.
So there's bullets everywhere. And everyone else on the train is screaming and rushing to one end of the car, and hammering on the doors, and climbing over each other to get out. But of course they can't. There's glass everywhere because one of those errant shots took out a window. Blood on the floor. A third person, and then a fourth pull, out their handguns because everyone's gotten handgun fever. And just then, the train goes underneath the East River for like two minutes, and the lights go out, which they sometimes do. I mean, I guarantee you, as someone who has taken to subways like Barbara Underwood, for most of my adult life, this is the number one nightmare scenario of every single New Yorker, but not for Samuel Alito of Hamilton Township, New Jersey.
Barbara Underwood
How many people with illegal guns, if that's what you're referring to.
Samuel A. Alito, Jr.
Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. How many illegal guns were seized by the New York Police Department last year? Do you have any idea?
Barbara Underwood
I don't have that number, but I'm sure it's a substantial number.
Samuel A. Alito, Jr.
But all these people with illegal guns, they're on the subway, they're walking around the streets. But the ordinary, hardworking law abiding people I mentioned, no, they can't be armed.
Malcolm Gladwell
Samuel Alito is in the grip of a peculiar and powerful fantasy that says that below the surface of one of the safest cities in the country, late at night, all rules of civilization have been suspended. You're on your own. And Barbara Underwood, who no doubt prepared long and hard for this date before the highest court in the land does not seem to have prepared for this. I mean, who would? How would she have guessed that Samuel Alito thinks the A train is Lord of the Flies?
Barbara Underwood
Well, I think the subways, when there are problems on the subways are protected by the transit police is what happens. Because the idea of proliferating arms on the subway is precisely, I think, what terrifies a great many people. The other point is that proliferating guns in a populated area where there is law enforcement, jeopardizes law enforcement because when they come, they now can't tell who's shooting and the shooting proliferates and accelerates.
Malcolm Gladwell
She's trying really, really hard at this point, not just to say, are you effing kidding me, Jersey boy? Have you ever ridden a subway before?
But Barbara Underwood is a lawyer of long experience. Her obligation is to her client, not her own mounting feelings of incredulity. So she takes a deep breath and holds it in.
Barbara Underwood
And in the end, that's why there's a substantial law enforcement interest in not having widespread carrying of guns.
Malcolm Gladwell
So here's the puzzle. Where did this completely lunatic idea come from? How did Samuel Alito, legal powerhouse, come up with this weird, violent fantasy with the best path to ensuring the safety of a subway rider is to encourage that rider and all of his fellow commuters to stuff a handgun in their waistband and face down their assailant mano a mano on the A train as it passes underneath the East River? There are countless law review articles devoted to the origins of the American love affair with guns. Histories of the evolution of our thinking about the Second Amendment. When confronted with a powerful idea, we assume that it has deep and serious roots. But come on, this isn't an idea, it's a fantasy.
And where do fantasies come from? From the stories we're told in childhood. When I look at grownup Samuel Alito dreaming about bad guys on the A train, I think of little Sammy Alito growing up in the 1950s in Hamilton Township, New Jersey. And I wonder, did he watch one too many episodes of Gunsmoke? In particular, episode eight from season one, Kite's Reward?
In the 1870s, cattle will be herded to market from Texas to Kansas up to the so-called cattle towns that were junction points connected to major railway lines. The longest lived and most infamous of those cattle towns was Dodge City.
It sits on the banks of the Arkansas River and was connected by rail to the east to Kansas City. In its heyday, Dodge City was like Fort Lauderdale during spring break only with a fraction of the girls. Just lots of young men, alcohol and guns. 1,200 full-time residents, 19 bars, filled with fortune seekers, buffalo hunters, cowboys, gamblers, desperadoes, what they call in Western's, hard characters. Here's a typical Dodge City story that appeared in the Wichita Beacon in November of 1872.
"Three or four Texas men," the paper reported, "took over the Kelly and Hunt Dance Hall. One of them made whiskey and sugar free to everybody while the others kept up the dance, music and condiments until daylight."
I think you're getting the picture.
The article goes on, "The dance room was also occupied by a gambling outfit." Oh, okay. "One of the Texas men who were giving away the free booze and sugar accuses one of the gamblers of cheating, and, quote, grabbed up the entire wealth of the concern to appropriate it, end quote. Whereupon one of the gamblers fractured the skull of one of the Texans with a six shooter. He dies. The cowboys come to the aid of their fallen comrade, there's a gun battle, two more are shot dead, a third wounded. The bodies are thrown out onto the street, and, here's the crucial detail, the party goes merrily on.
That's Dodge City. As you can imagine. The tabloids of the era couldn't get enough of this. The expression, which I'm sure you've heard, "We've got to get out of Dodge", is a reference to Dodge City.
So what is Gunsmoke? It's a TV show set in Dodge City where the hero, Matt Dillon, has the job of restoring law and order amidst the mayhem. Every other episode begins with a shot of Dillon squaring off against a bad guy in the main street of Dodge. He out draws him, shoots the bad guy dead, then after the credits, we see Dillon walking through a cemetery where all the many dead are buried and in voiceover delivering a little homily about the enormous weight on his shoulders.
Matt Dillon
They all drifted here to Dodge City one time or another, the buffalo killers, the saddle bums, the spoilers. It's the end of the track and the start of the wilderness, the dumping ground of odds and ends and beginnings and leftovers, it's a place to stop and take the kind of pleasure you need. It's a place to pass through and sometimes, it's a place to die.
Malcolm Gladwell
So episode eight, season one, Kite's Reward. The young blonde man's name is Andy, he's just shot the stranger dead. Dillon has taken his gun. They go back to Dillon's office where Andy is given a lecture.
Matt Dillon
Trouble sure come running after you in a hurry, didn't it?
Andy
What's a man supposed to do in this town? Stand there and take a belly full of bullets?
Malcolm Gladwell
Then Dylan says, "I can give you back your gun, but I think you shouldn't wear one anymore. You're too good with it. You're going to get a reputation. People will come after you to see if they can best you."
Matt Dillon
It happened to me once, Andy, and it's happening to you. Anybody who can use a gun the way you can, has to make a choice. You can go on using it or you can quit before you get blood all over you.
Malcolm Gladwell
They have a heart to heart. Dillon is the wise father figure Andy clearly never had. Dillon: "Why don't you quit wearing it."
Andy: "I don't know, I'd feel kind of naked I guess.
Dillon persists.
Matt Dillon
Well, it's going to be one man after the other. From now on, you're going to have to kill whether you like it or not. But I'm not going to watch it. Now, you leave that gun off or you get out of Dodge and go do your killing somewhere else.
Malcolm Gladwell
Finally, Andy agrees, unbuckles his gun belt hands over his six shooter and holster.
All right, let's pause once again because there are so many things to discuss. First of all, let's deal with a non-trivial matter of the homicide that just occurred inside the Long Branch Saloon. To help put this event in some kind of statistical perspective, I recruited the services of my very able assistant and producer, Tali Emlen. Okay, so a couple of weeks ago I gave you an assignment. Describe for us the assignment.
Tali Emlen
So the assignment was to watch, well, first you said to watch all of Gunsmoke.
Malcolm Gladwell
Which is bananas.
Tali Emlen
Yeah, it's like 20 seasons, something like that. But then the assignment turned into watching the first two seasons of Gunsmoke.
Malcolm Gladwell
Tali ordered the complete Gunsmoke collection on DVD.
Do you even know what a DVD is? This is like so prior generation.
Tali Emlen
Oh, I grew up watching DVDs.
Malcolm Gladwell
Just checking, just checking.
Tali Emlen
But I don't have a DVD player, so I got the DVDs and then I wound up having to watch on my roommate's PS4, which was kind of funny.
Malcolm Gladwell
This is the first time in human history someone watched Gunsmoke on a PS4.
Tali Emlen
I think so, yeah.
Malcolm Gladwell
There are 39 episodes per season. So Tali watched 78 in total, a statistically representative sample.
Tali Emlen
Yeah. So the assignment was to watch every episode and make note of any time there's a gunshot and anytime there's a homicide. So I counted any time somebody was killed on purpose. So there's a few instances of someone accidentally getting shot and I didn't count that as homicide.
Malcolm Gladwell
And then you created an Excel spreadsheet?
Tali Emlen
Yeah.
Malcolm Gladwell
You also described the nature of the shooting.
Tali Emlen
Yes.
Malcolm Gladwell
Yes. And so give me the bottom line on the statistics of number of gunshots and homicides in the first two seasons of Gunsmoke.
Tali Emlen
All right, let me just pull this up really quick. Okay, so starting with season one, we had a total of 212 gunshots in the whole season. And this includes gunshots in the air just to scare people or something like that. And then of those 212, 132 were shots specifically pointed at people. There were 59 homicides and 46 of those homicides were from gunshots.
Malcolm Gladwell
Ok. And then season two?
Tali Emlen
So the number of gunshots that I counted for season two was 151. Of those, there were 52 homicides and of the gunshots in total in the season, 111 were pointed specifically at people.
Malcolm Gladwell
As far as I can tell, Tali performed the first ever statistically rigorous forensic analysis of the Gunsmoke archive.
Tali, I used those numbers and I calculated independently what the homicide rate per 100,000 is for the town of Dodge as depicted in Gunsmoke. That works out given there's 1,200 people in Dodge, a homicide rate of I think 4,917 per 100,000, which would be like eight times higher than the highest homicide rate in any city in the United States today.
Tali Emlen
Oh my God.
Malcolm Gladwell
It's like the most murderous ... There was one episode where eight people were killed.
Tali Emlen
Yeah, yeah. That was all at once too. I remember that episode.
Malcolm Gladwell
That's a mass shooting.
Tali Emlen
Yes.
Malcolm Gladwell
The writers of Gunsmoke were committed to portraying Dodge City as a very, very dangerous place.
Now, was Dodge in real life that dangerous? Was it actually the case that a river of blood flowed to the center of Dodge City, Kansas in the latter half of the 19th century? There was so much mythmaking that surrounded Dodge City, that for the longest time people assumed that the mythical Dodge City and the actual Dodge City were the same. This was the Wild West.
But a homicide is a matter of record. Towns, even deeply dysfunctional towns collect death certificates. They have newspapers that report on murders, court records that document criminal trials, graveyards where people are buried. And in the 1960s, a historian named Robert Dykstra decided to fact check the claims about Dodge City.
Here's what he discovered. In 1872, the year Dodge City was founded, the homicide count was 18, which in a town of 1,200 people is nuts. But that was before the town had a police force. They promptly got themselves a county sheriff and for the next couple of years, there are no homicides at all.
And for the 11 years that follow until the cattle trading period ends, Dodge City averages 1.6 homicides a year, which is still a lot for a small town, but not that bad for a place that's basically spring break on steroids.
The real Dodge City is nothing like the mythical Dodge City. The real Dodge City is proof that law and order works. You bring in a lawman and the place goes back to normal, which is a hundred percent the opposite lesson of television's Dodge City, isn't it?
Gunsmoke says that you can be blessed with a diligent, wise, rangy, indefatigable, courageous US Marshall, the legendary Matt Dillon, and he will invariably catch the bad guy and gun him down on the street. But at the very thing that police are supposed to do, and in fact do in the real world, that is stop murders from happening, Matt Dillon is helpless.
He's the US Marshal for Dodge City for 20 seasons, and the bodies just keep piling up. He's the head of law enforcement in a town with an implied homicide rate 80 times higher than St. Louis, Missouri, the murder capital of the Western world. He's terrible at his job. He should have been run out of town.
And yet, he is not because in the bizarre fantasy being pedaled by Gunsmoke, there are so many bad guys, and so many guns, and so many shootouts in bars that every man must take responsibility for protecting himself.
If you have a quiet drink at the Long Branch Saloon and a stranger comes in with an itchy finger, you have to be prepared to defend yourself. It's up to you because there's no guarantee that Matt Dillon will rush in in time to help you.
Now, do I worry that lesson reverberated with little Sammy Alito watching Gunsmoke on his parents black and white RCA back in Hamilton Township, New Jersey?
Yes, I do.
By the way, it wasn't just Alito. Right after Alito goes off on his strange rant about the perils of the A train, guess who chimes in, Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Of course he does. Brett Kavanaugh, child of the Washington DC suburbs whose only experience of mass transit was being carpooled to private school in the back of his mother's Dodge minivan.
Brett M. Kavanaugh
What if you're a runner and you say, I run a lot. And as you correctly pointed out earlier, there are a lot of serious violent crimes on running paths. It's a real problem.
Malcolm Gladwell
It's a real problem? Justice Kavanaugh now wonders, if the runners of New York would be well served strapping on a Glock in order to defend themselves against the murderous grievances of their fellow joggers as they trudge their way around the Central Park reservoir. If Barbara Underwood was taken aback by Sam Alito, then Kavanaugh, I mean she's like, what is happening? She tries to explain. Have you thought about what would happen if New York issued a handgun to anyone who wanted one?
Barbara Underwood
The problem with the shall issue regimes is that they multiply the number of firearms that are being carried in very densely populated places and there is a much higher risk, without assuming any ill intent on the part of the carriers of weapons, they greatly proliferate the likelihood that mistakes will be made, fights will break out.
Malcolm Gladwell
Barbara Underwood dearly does not want to find herself in the middle of a gun battle when she walks her dog around the reservoir on a Sunday morning. But she's not up against a rational argument here. She's up against a fantasy, a fantasy shared by a whole group of middle-aged men on the Supreme Court. The fantasies of little boys who once spent too many hours in front of the television.
The heyday of Dodge City, the real Dodge City overlaps with the invention of one of the most important firearms of that era, maybe one of the top five most important weapons ever. The six shooter. Patented by Samuel Colt, perfected by Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson.
Brennan Rivas
So revolvers were fairly easy to get by about 1850, but by 1870 and 1880, you could order them for just a few dollars through a catalog. It was incredible the number of revolvers that were available and circulating in public as compared to decades past.
Malcolm Gladwell
That's the historian Brennan Rivas. The pistols of the early 19th century were cumbersome, unreliable, inaccurate. People were more worried about bowie knives than they were about handguns. The arrival of the revolver changed all that. The invention of a weapon with a cylinder filled with bullets that rotates every time the trigger is pulled, solved every problem that plagued the 19th century handgun.
So you have a proliferation of a gun that is a significant innovation. It's cheap, it's effective, it has all kinds of other ... Can you describe a little bit the kind social and political response to the proliferation of the revolver?
Brennan Rivas
Well, a major response from American people was to talk about how sad it was that people were being shot all the time. You see a tremendous outpouring of sadness and frustration that lives are being lost, people's lives are being ruined, all as a result of someone resorting to using these really deadly weapons. So the social response was something that we're not altogether unfamiliar with, the primary media of the day talking about and lamenting the loss of life as a result of these weapons and saying that something should be done.
Malcolm Gladwell
Walk me through the various strategies that were tried in this era in response to the revolver.
Brennan Rivas
Well, the first strategy is what scholars are now calling public carry laws. And they started out by prohibiting in statutory language, in clear black and white, you can't carry or conceal these certain weapons in public spaces, and there would be some sort of a penalty.
Malcolm Gladwell
There were laws prohibiting guns from certain sensitive places, taxes imposed to make guns more expensive.
If we just use Texas as our example, so how many of those strategies are being deployed in Texas in the latter part of the 19th century?
Brennan Rivas
I believe all of them except for personal taxation and banning the sale of certain weapons. By 1900 in Texas, there was a sensitive places law that was very broad. It covered everything from polling places on election days to circuses, any public gathering was a disarmed space. There was also a public carry law that applied not only to concealed weapons, but to openly carried weapons as well. So you could not carry a bowie knife or a pistol or various other concealable deadly weapons in public beyond the confines of your own property at all.
Malcolm Gladwell
By the turn of the 20th century, there were also taxes on gun dealers and a law against selling arms to minors.
So Texas gun laws in 1890 are way more restrictive than they are in 2023.
Brennan Rivas
Yes.
Malcolm Gladwell
And is Texas an outlier in those years? Are there other large states that have similar kind of positions on gun violence to that?
Brennan Rivas
I would not say Texas is an outlier. It was a very common approach.
Malcolm Gladwell
Huge parts of the country were covered by gun control laws in the 19th century, laws that would seem unacceptable today. That's how much people were spooked by the rise of the revolver. There's even a subspecialty of American History devoted to digging up all the old gun laws that were on the books around this time.
Patrick, can you do me a favor? Can you pull up the list of cities that you discovered had gun control ordinances in the late 19th century and just read me 20 of the city names?
Patrick Charles
Okay, I'll go to my appendix because I have these things all over the place.
Malcolm Gladwell
This is Patrick Charles, one of the leading gun law sleuths.
Patrick Charles
All right, let's go to ...
So if we go to California, right, we've got Sacramento, we've got San Francisco, Napa, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Alameda. If you go to Kansas, these are cities that probably, unless you're from Kansas, you don't even know Argentine, Delphos, Lakin, Concordia, Holton, Coffeeville. But then if you go beyond that, we've got places such as, and Brooklyn was not always part of New York City. You've got Brooklyn, you've got Nashville, Tennessee, St. Louis, Missouri, Wheeling, West Virginia, Salt Lake City, Utah, St. Paul, Minnesota, Berlin, Wisconsin, Evanston, Illinois. There's also Chicago had it.
Malcolm Gladwell
So wait, so stop there.
Guess who else had a gun law in place? Dodge City, Kansas. After that first murderous season in 1872, the town cracked down. At the bridge over the Arkansas River, which every cowboy crossed on his way into Dodge City, there was a big sign, "The carrying of firearms strictly prohibited."
The law said that you had to check your gun at the sheriff's office or town hall or some other designated building. One spot was the local brick factory. The owner said that at one point he had hundreds of revolvers stacked up in his storeroom. You got a chit, like a coat check token, which you turned in for your gun when you left town.
In Dodge City, the penalty for breaking that law was a $100 or three months in jail or both! When the murder rate ticked back up to one or two a year, the local paper got all upset and accused the police of going easy on gun owners.
Like the time when the Marshal took a gun off a drunken troublemaker in a bar and foolishly gave the gun to the man's boss, who promptly gave it back to his employee, who then killed somebody. Not smart.
So Gunsmoke comes along in the mid 1950s, and in its first season with half the country's television audience watching, it introduces us to their version of Dodge City, the world's most dangerous place. And in those first few episodes, it has to deal with the question of what Matt Dillon, the symbol of law and authority, should do about this extraordinary violence.
He can't turn a blind eye to it, can he? Oh no, he has to take action. They decide to have him try what his real life counterparts tried, gun control. So Matt Dillon takes away Andy's gun, and Andy is transformed.
Our blonde-haired gunman gets a job at the local stables. The owner loves him, says, "I wish he was my son." We see Andy at the local saloon having a single chased beer, chatting politely with the beautiful proprietress.
A bully challenges him to a fist fight. Andy drops him with a punch. Matt Dillon looks on admiringly because he has liberated Andy from his gun. Dillon has been given moral purpose. Andy has been given redemption. Both men see a way forward out of the unrelenting bleakness that is Dodge City.
Andy
You know something, Marshall?
Matt Dillon
What?
Andy
You was right about me not wearing a gun. I'm glad I took it off.
Malcolm Gladwell
"You was right about me not wearing a gun."
But then commercial break. And when we come back, a stranger shows up in Dodge City asking after Andy, says, "Andy's an outlaw."
Says, "Andy used to be part of the Fisher Gang down in Laramie, Wyoming. There's a bounty on his head. $1,000 dead or alive."
The stranger finds Andy in the stables says, "You're coming with me."
Andy says, "No way." Andy goes for his gun, but he's got no gun. Matt Dillon took it. He grabs at air and the bounty hunter shoots him in the chest.
Matt Dillon rushes in. Too late. He goes to the stricken Andy lying on the ground.
Andy
I forgot. Forgot about my gun. I went for it before I remembered. Didn't work out so good, did it Marshall? Not so good. Just cause I forgot and went for my ...
Malcolm Gladwell
He dies, and the bounty hunter turns to Matt Dillon.
Bounty Hunter
He went for his gun. I had to kill him.
Malcolm Gladwell
Dillon is gazing, grief stricken, into the endless prairie horizon.
Matt Dillon
No, you didn't kill him.
Bounty Hunter
What?
Matt Dillon
I killed him.
Malcolm Gladwell
And somewhere in the suburbs of Hamilton Township, little Sammy Alito, already dreaming of one day wearing the long black robes of the high court, learns a lesson he will never forget.
Guns don't kill people, gun control does.
Our Revisionist History Gun series was produced by Jacob Smith, Ben Naddaff-Hafrey, Kiara Powell, Tali Emlen, and Lee Mengistu. We were edited by Peter Clowney and Julia Barton. Fact-checking by Arthur Gompertz and Keishel Williams. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mastering by Flawn Williams. Engineering by Nina Lawrence. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
The Host
