First wave of unarmed citizenry? How'd that look?

Factual Questions
1

(With apologies for the wording in my first attempt, I was neither trying to be in anyway provocative or political, I was struggling for a succinct descriptive title, beyond ‘seeking history lesson’ and used a phrase I read here all the time. Oopsy, totally my bad, sincerest apologies all around!)

However my post stands unchanged:

(Forgive me for not being more informed on American history, as a Canadian some periods are spotty.)

So Americans have always had the right to bear arms, and we can all agree, I think, there was a time, when the country was being settled, that probably many citizens walked around armed, had access to a gun, maybe even a gun in most homes?

So my question is what did that transition to NOT walking around with a gun, look like? Was there a campaign after several accidents? Cities and towns pass ordinances? Bar owners restrict access? Or did it just happen somewhat organically, when the actual ‘need’ for it fell away? When organized, trustworthy policing became the standard perhaps?

Was there pushback against the slightest restriction, no matter how common sense it might seem? Was it partisan? A political divide? Was there frothy rhetoric?

I got to wondering about this, the other day, and find I am increasingly interested to learn more.

I am sincerely interested in how that transition happened, what initiated it, was it met with resistance? What was happening that society moved towards being less armed?

2

I’m not sure what transition you’re referring to. There have always been many Americans with guns, and there have always been many Americans without guns.

3

There is no transition to speak of.

It is still the case than many Americans have access to guns. That has not changed. There has never been a time when most Americans walked around armed. So that hasn’t changed, either.

4

You just need to watch a few episodes of ‘Little House on the Prairie’.
I’m sure it’s on-line somewhere now.
The civilization of the west was the growth of small towns.
They elected Sheriffs so each and every citizen in town didn’t need to carry or own a gun.
In dire times, the Sheriff would rally up a posse of volunteers. If that happened very often, the Sheriff hired deputies.

Inversely, I’m pretty sure there are neighborhoods in certain urban areas that have more firearms than an old west small town.

5

I don’t know if this affects the discussion, but I rather doubt that people routinely carried firearms at any point in US history. That is, I wouldn’t expect (except under special circumstances) that one would be plowing the back 40 with a musket on your back or driving into town for groceries with a flintlock pistol in your belt. I would think there would be a rifle or two in the house, for hunting as well as home defense, but not carried routinely.

Regards,
Shodan

6

Agree with the first couple of replies. There basically was no transition. Laws were proposed (like the National Firearms Act of 1934) which were substantially diluted into relative ineffectiveness. Meanwhile the destructive power of guns continued to increase with new technology, and in the face of calls for gun control groups like the NRA became more powerful and entrenched to oppose them. The rest, as they say, is history. I don’t know where you get this impression of “unarmed citizenry”. You must be thinking of some other country.

7

The UK maybe:)

8

First of all , you’ve seen too many Hollywood movies. There was never a time when most citizens walked around armed, and even during the days of the “wild west”, places like Tombstone Arizona had strict gun control laws within the city

The transition you are asking about was just a natural level of social change, which happened gradually in response to the changes in peoples’ lifestyles. It’s probably comparable to the transition from horses to cars–it started first in the large cities, and then spread to rural areas, over a period of 30 or 40 years. Just as horses gradually became unnecessary, so carrying a gun gradually became unnecessary.

9

Also, bear in mind that America was made of waves a waves of immigrants. The Irish, Italians, Germans, Jews and many others hadn’t carried weapons before they moved to the U.S., and saw no need to start when they arrived.

10

Washington Post article with a similar theme:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2014/04/29/rick-santorums-misguided-view-of-gun-control-in-the-wild-west/

In cattle towns, you generally had to leave your gun with the sheriff. Towns without gun control (eg mining towns) had higher murder rates. Murder rates were high in the West, but the population was low so that might translate into 1-2 murders in a cattle town per year. Or 29 murders per year if it was a mining town without gun control.

11

First of all, nobody–anywhere-- regularly walked around with a pistol anywhere until at least the 1850s or so. Before then, pistols were single-shot with a couple minutes reloading time, not very reliable particularly if they were being carried around loaded, and inaccurate.

In colonial times, many non-urban families probably had a rifle for hunting, and members of the militia had a musket at home, but nobody carried them around (unless they were out hunting of course). And people in cities probably didn’t have any at all.

12

It’s a function of urbanization. When nearly all Americans lived off the land and hunted for food, nearly everyone had a gun. When the industrial revolution compressed the society into urban units, two things happened. First, there was a significant reduction in the day to day utility of a gun, when living in a crowded city with nothing to hunt. Second, a large part of the social makeup of the city consisted of immigrants, who did not bring guns with them, and more than likely came from countries where common people had no familiarity with guns.

13

I’m pretty sure we have more guns today, and more people carrying guns, than at any other time in our nation’s history. Basically, I question your premise. There never was a “wave” of unarmed citizens. Gun ownership has been going nowhere but up.

14

Okay, a quick google search shows that gun ownership (by household, not necessarily by the number of guns) is down over the past 40 years. But it also seems to be going up over the past decade or so.

I still question the larger trend over the past ~250 years. But my google-fu is weak today.

15

Well, out away from the cities & big towns, there was less need after we killed most of the Indians.

Not having a weapon close to hand was really dependent on time and place.

People forget also, that in Canada, first there were laws & government and then the great influx of people.

In the US, the people came first, law & order came in behind them.

The whole gun thing has a big cultural divide and historical differences between the two countries.

Now I don’t know about the overall average of the US and how many carried a personal weapon on a daily basis if they were leaving the house or barn but I can tell you I personally knew many who were still doing into the 1950’s. All good religious people who did not cause trouble but did not back up a lot and were in small towns that were too small to have a local law man.
The really did not need one and when they did, the locked up, tied up, killed or otherwise took care of it and sent someone to the county seat to bring the appropriate folks over if they thought it was necessary to come after they heard what was going on.

No matter, in this country we threw out the government of the time and started a new one. Canada did not. Maybe there is something in the water that makes us that way.

I like the way it is so I don’t want to see it change.

YMMV

16

Pretty much. One of the most daunting aspects of starting a revolutionary war was the dearth of arms and gunpowder. George Washington was mislead as to how much powder was available for a potential army and wrote that if he had known there was so little, he would not have accepted the job as general of the army. The patriots had to raid British supply posts to obtain cannon and powder. In the notable Battle of Bunker Hill, they ran out of shot and shell and had to retreat.

17

What happened was that from the latter half of the nineteenth century until roughly after World War Two, the US went through a period categorized by increasing illiberalism and authoritarianism, perhaps in response to social problems in the big cities and nativist fears of new immigrants. Court decisions from that period were often shockingly dismissive of individual rights, and usually held that the general police power of the state could outlaw virtually anything in the name of social order. It didn’t help that the Second Amendment had never been incorporated so gun rights had even less protection than others.

There were always limited “time and place” laws and ordinances about carrying firearms, but the idea that citizens shouldn’t be armed has gradually built up since roughly the Civil War. African-Americans had early been the target of gun control laws- antebellum, with the expressed purpose of denying them full citizenship. And as time went on further restrictions were passed against immigrants, leftist radicals, poor people and striking workers.

One big turning point was the Supreme Court decision in Presser V. Illinois in 1886, when the court upheld Presser’s conviction for organizing an armed self-defense cadre against state law. In 1911, New York passed the Sullivan Act, which enshrined the principle of May Issue, that carrying concealable weapons could be flatly forbidden without government permission.

(Critics contend that the Sullivan Act was aimed at Italian immigrants and intended specifically to disarm them so they’d be at the mercy of Irish gangs who were under Tammany Hall’s protection. And gun murders went up after the Act’s passage.) The principle of May Issue was promoted around the country during the 1920s and '30s by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, which drew up “A Uniform Act to Regulate the Sale and Possession of Firearms”, which enshrined May Issue as one of it’s key features. As part of the Roosevelt administration’s push for federalization, the 1934 National Firearms Act strongly regulated (but technically did not actually ban) fully automatic firearms.

That was the status quo until the 1960s, when the radical left had a brief love affair with guns, and combined with notorious assassinations sparked a new wave of gun laws. Laws dating from this time include mandatory serial numbers, heavy restrictions on interstate sale of guns, and banning the importation of many types of foreign firearms. The high water of gun control was probably in the 1980s, when groups like the Brady Campaign sought measures to gradually phase out the private ownership of handguns.

In short, laws forbidding those other people from having guns have long been popular, and the usual reaction to violent crime and social disorder is to try to contain it by prohibiting weapons.

18

Oh, come on Shodan – look at our Minnesota State Seal on the State Flag. It shows a farmer plowing his field with his rifle, not actually on his back, but leaning against a tree stump at the edge of the field.

It would hardly have been immortalized on the Great Seal of the State if it was unheard of.

19

I think if you look a little farther afield – i.e.- globally – you’ll find that “the usual reaction to violent crime and social disorder” in most developed countries has been the establishment of principles of social justice and a peaceful culture, and that the control – not “prohibition” – of weapons is just one relatively small part of that strategy.

20

Unfortunately social reform is a difficult and lengthy process, and too often banning something- like alcohol or guns or narcotics- is taken as the quick’n’easy way. Americans just LOVE to think you can solve a problem by beating it hard enough.