Rick Santorum is Wrong About the History of Gun Control

I blogged a few days ago about Georgia's new law that expands the ability of people to carry concealed firearms. Georgia's law expands the rights of people to carry firearms in and around airports (though not past security screenings), in bars, and in other places.

Recently, former presidential aspirant Rick Santorum spoke out in favor of the bill, arguing that it will make Georgia a safer place. The Hill reports on an event where Santorum defended his view on the law:

He dismissed a question from “Face the Nation” host Bob Schieffer that the bill could turn the state into the “O.K. Corral.” 

“Everybody romanticizes the O.K. Corral and everything that happened, but gun crimes were not very prevalent back then,” Santorum responded. “Why? Because people carried guns.”

But I recall from Adam Winkler's excellent book, Gunfight, that the widespread carrying of guns was not the reason why gun crime was so prevalent in the old west -- especially not in Tombstone, Arizona where the showdown at the O.K. Corral took place. According to Winkler:

Americans have long celebrated that shootout as a defining incident in our cultural heritage of guns. Less often recognized, however, is the central role gun control played in that day's events. Two years before the gunfight, the Tombstone city council adopted a law known as Ordinance No. 9. The title of the ordinance was "To Provide against the Carrying of Deadly Weapons." 

It was the failure of the Clantons and McLaurys to abide by the requirements of Ordinance No. 9 that provoked the shootout. Recall that Ike Clanton was arrested and fined twenty-five dollars, not a trivial amount in 1881. The fine was the penalty imposed on Ike for walking around the town armed, in violation of Ordinance No. 9. When Wyat Earp beat Tom McLaury on the street, it wasn't just out of anger. Wyatt demanded that Tom turn over the concealed firearm that Earp believed tom was carrying, again in violation of the ordinance. Instead of depositing their guns upon their arrival in Tombstone, the Clanton/McLaury gang was still armed when spotted at the gun shop loading up on ammunition just a few minutes before the shootout. . . . [N]o one doubts that the Cowboys had broken the law -- a gun control law. (172-173).

Winkler goes on in his book to note that gun control ordinances like Ordinance No. 9 were extremely common in western towns. While carrying guns on the frontier for self-defense was a near-universal practice, many towns required those passing through to leave their guns with the sheriff while they were within city limits.

So Santorum is completely wrong here. Gun crimes were rare in the west not because people constantly carried firearms, but because they constantly had to forfeit their firearms when entering towns. In Santorum's defense, Bob Schieffer's question hinted at the misconception that western towns were filled with guns, but that does not excuse Santorum from turning the misleading reference into a complete tall-tale.