Jim, I totally agree about people being better behaved when a lot of them are armed. That's why there really were not many gunfights at the OK Corral, or most anyplace else in the old west. Those cowboys all carried guns, but I doubt if many of them really were good shots, or were gunslingers like in the movies. The "old west" lasted about 10 years around the 1880s. Most cowboys, if they had a gun at all, carried them to shoot snakes and coyotes. The gunslingers like Wyatt Earp, the James brothers, the Daltons, Billy the Kid and so on were social misfits who lasted a few years. The dime novels written for the people back east were mostly fiction.