Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: It isn't often that a writer or any man is
Speaker 2: given an opportunity to destroy a figure he's always hated,
Speaker 2: a character that all his life has cluttered his landscape
Speaker 2: like a slum. And to be able to do so and
Speaker 2: get paid for it to boot is to be doubly blessed.
Speaker 1: The co creator of the greatest television western of all
Speaker 1: time was a man named John Meston.
Speaker 2: My needed figure is the Western hero who rides along
Speaker 2: plomping his guitar, nasily singing a synthetic ballad and looking
Speaker 2: for all the world like a fugitive from a cheap circus.
Speaker 2: I spit in his milk and he llleft to go
Speaker 2: elsewhere to find somebody to pour the lead for his
Speaker 2: golden bullets. Now, the best way to destroy something bad
Speaker 2: is to write it down. Was something better, And I've
Speaker 2: got a guy I think out classes any of these
Speaker 2: phony big heads.
Speaker 1: Meston gave the world gun Smoke, which ran on CBS
Speaker 1: for an astounding twenty seasons from nineteen fifty five to
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy five, one of the most widely watched TV
Speaker 1: shows ever. When it's run finally ended, the La Times
Speaker 1: film critic referred to it as our own Iliad and Odyssey,
Speaker 1: only in the place of Odysseus and Achilles, Meston gave
Speaker 1: us Matt Dillon, lanky, laconic, impossibly brave, one of the
Speaker 1: great reluctant heroes in television history.
Speaker 2: This hair is probably red. If he's got any left.
Speaker 2: He'd be handsomer than he is if he had better manners.
Speaker 2: But life and his enemies have left him looking a
Speaker 2: little beat up. And I suppose having seen his mother
Speaker 2: back about eighteen four body struggling to take a bath
Speaker 2: in a wooden washtub with a fully undressing left his
Speaker 2: soul a little warped. Anyway, they'd have to be something
Speaker 2: wrong with him, or he wouldn't have hired on as
Speaker 2: a United States Marshal and the heyday of Dives City,
Speaker 2: Kansas Dodge at that time was the wildest town in America,
Speaker 2: and it was populated by men just as warped and
Speaker 2: more so than Matt Dillon.
Speaker 1: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
Speaker 1: my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is
Speaker 1: about Westerns and the long shadow they've cast across American life.
Speaker 1: It's possible you've never thought about westerns, maybe you've never
Speaker 1: even seen one, but your parents and particularly your grandparents
Speaker 1: most certainly did. In the mid nineteen fifties, westerns took
Speaker 1: up a third of all evening television viewing time. If
Speaker 1: you lived in a major city, lake New York, you
Speaker 1: had your choice of fifty one different westerns in a
Speaker 1: given week. And what were westerns? Well, they were stories
Speaker 1: about big strong men. The heroes of the top six
Speaker 1: westerns of nineteen sixty two averaged six foot four and
Speaker 1: two hundred and ten pounds, white, big strong men. There
Speaker 1: wasn't a lot of ethnic variation in the TV Western.
Speaker 1: There weren't a lot of women or families, even though
Speaker 1: the reason all those pioneers moved to the Wild West
Speaker 1: was of course to provide a better life for their families.
Speaker 1: There wasn't a lot of moral ambiguity or introspection or
Speaker 1: shades of gray. These were action shows. But what was
Speaker 1: there a lot of There were a lot of guns.
Speaker 1: And in this installment of our series on gun violence,
Speaker 1: I want to figure out what it means that an
Speaker 1: entire generation of Americans grew up watching a world in
Speaker 1: which big strong men shot at each other. With guns
Speaker 1: in the act absence of any kind of cultural or
Speaker 1: moral or psychological ambiguity. Our case study gun Smoke, the
Speaker 1: greatest of all the TV westerns, and one episode in particular,
Speaker 1: Season one, episode eight Kites Reward. Picture a long, dusty
Speaker 1: street straight out of the Old West, downtown Dodge City,
Speaker 1: the most infamous of the cattle towns of the eighteen seventies.
Speaker 1: Long row of ramshackle wooden buildings, bars, stables, a general store,
Speaker 1: cowboys sauntering to and fro. Our hero Matt Dillon is
Speaker 1: sitting on a porch talking to his friend Chester. They
Speaker 1: spot a man, a stranger, lurking around the long Branch saloon.
Speaker 1: Then a second stranger, much younger, handsome, blonde, approaches on
Speaker 1: horseback and dismounts.
Speaker 3: Who's that.
Speaker 2: Some betrayal hand come to lose his wages?
Speaker 1: Probably The blonde man walks into a bar orders a beer.
Speaker 1: The older man, the one who had been lurking, follows
Speaker 1: him in, pulls out a sick shooter and says, in
Speaker 1: that biting tone peculiar to this era of TV villain, turn.
Speaker 2: Around, keep your hand away from that gun. I'm gonna
Speaker 2: take your gun.
Speaker 4: No, you're not.
Speaker 5: You want to die, don't matter none to me.
Speaker 6: Go ahead, all right, But.
Speaker 1: The young man is much too quick for his foe.
Speaker 1: He pulls out his revolver in what seems like a heartbeat.
Speaker 1: His pursuer lies dead on the floor just as the
Speaker 1: man of the law, Marshall Matt Dillon, comes rushing in
Speaker 1: self defense.
Speaker 4: Marshall, I want your gun. I ain't right of a
Speaker 4: self defense, pure and simple. I said, I want your gun,
Speaker 4: all right, take it.
Speaker 1: And Matt Dylan takes his gun away. Now let's pause
Speaker 1: here because this is a hugely significant moment. First thing,
Speaker 1: maybe an obvious thing, this whole scene is very American.
Speaker 1: CBS made a Western sett in Canada at around the
Speaker 1: same time. It was about a mountain named Sergeant Preston
Speaker 1: who went around saving damsels in distress with the aid
Speaker 1: of an adorable dog named King. Sergeant Preston never resorted
Speaker 1: to violence. He relied on his wit, his courage, and
Speaker 1: the assistance of his adorable dog King. How did every
Speaker 1: episode end? Sergeant Preston turns to King and says, well, King,
Speaker 1: this case is closed. I mean, how Canadian is that?
Speaker 1: It's one of my greatest regrets that during my Canadian childhood.
Speaker 1: We didn't have a television in our house, and so
Speaker 1: I never got a chance to learn of the role
Speaker 1: large fluffy dogs played in Taming the Canadian North. Oh,
Speaker 1: but gun smoke, that's a different story. Episodes of gun
Speaker 1: Smoke did not end with Matt Dillon saying good Doggie,
Speaker 1: Good dogie. Second thing, why do we care so much
Speaker 1: about gun smoke? Because, and this is important, I'm trying
Speaker 1: to solve a puzzle having to do with the twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two case of New York State Pistol and Rifle
Speaker 1: Association the Bruin the Landmark decision, where the Supreme Court
Speaker 1: ruled that a New York state law restricting handgun licenses
Speaker 1: was unconstitutional. If you listen to the first episode of
Speaker 1: this mini series, which I dearly hope you do before
Speaker 1: you listen to this one, you'll know I have strong
Speaker 1: feeling about the Court's infatuation in that case with a
Speaker 1: certain disputatious seventeenth century slave trader named Sir John Knight.
Speaker 1: But here we are concerned with a broader puzzle. It
Speaker 1: came during oral arguments. Oral arguments are a big deal.
Speaker 1: Lawyers of both sides gathered to present their arguments publicly
Speaker 1: before all the assembled justices. Arguments are tested, questions are asked,
Speaker 1: the whole thing goes on for hours. It's Daniel in
Speaker 1: the Lions, then one lawyer versus nine of the keenest
Speaker 1: legal minds in the country. So November third, twenty twenty one,
Speaker 1: the Solicitor General of the State of New York is
Speaker 1: up at the front of the palatial hearing room. Barbara Underwood,
Speaker 1: serious glasses, kindly smile, kind of looks like your grandmother,
Speaker 1: that is, if your grandmother had argued twenty two cases
Speaker 1: before the Supreme Court.
Speaker 7: Mister Chief Justice, and may have please the Court. For centuries,
Speaker 7: English and American law have imposed limits on carrying firearms
Speaker 7: in public and the interest of public safety.
Speaker 1: She begins with a detailed explanation of how New York
Speaker 1: State is justified in not letting anyone carry a handgun
Speaker 1: who wants to carry a handgun. But then she's interrupted
Speaker 1: by Samuel Alito, one of the most conservative members of
Speaker 1: the Court and almost certainly the grumpiest.
Speaker 8: Could I explore what that means for ordinary law biding
Speaker 8: citizens who feel they need to carry a firearm for
Speaker 8: self defense. So I want you to think about people
Speaker 8: like this, people who work late at night in Manhattan.
Speaker 8: It might be somebody who cleans offices, might be a
Speaker 8: doorman at an apartment, might be a nurse or an
Speaker 8: orderly might be somebody who washes dishes. None of these
Speaker 8: people has a criminal record. They're all law biding citizens.
Speaker 8: They get off work around me, maybe even after midnight.
Speaker 8: They have to commute home by subway, maybe by bus.
Speaker 8: When they arrive at the subway station or the bus stop,
Speaker 8: they have to walk some distance through a high crime area.
Speaker 1: They're scared to death, Alito said, So why shouldn't they
Speaker 1: be allowed to carry a handgun on their subway ride home? Now,
Speaker 1: it should be pointed out that Barbara Underwood has spent
Speaker 1: years working in the DA's office in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens.
Speaker 1: She's a New Yorker. She's familiar with the subway. Alito, meanwhile,
Speaker 1: is a kid from New Jersey, went to school at Princeton,
Speaker 1: worked most of his life in the New Jersey suburbs
Speaker 1: before moving to the Washington, DC suburbs. I'm going to
Speaker 1: guess that most of what he knows about the New
Speaker 1: York subway is from old beastie boys. Videos that he
Speaker 1: was trying to stop his kids from watching. So Underwood says,
Speaker 1: as any long time subway rider would say.
Speaker 7: I think the extra problem in Manhattan is that you're
Speaker 7: hypothetical quite appropriately entailed the subways, entailed public transit, and
Speaker 7: there are lots of people on the subways even at midnight.
Speaker 7: As I can say from personal experience and the particular
Speaker 7: specter of a lot of armed people in an enclosed space.
Speaker 8: There are a lot of armed people on the streets
Speaker 8: of New York and in the subways late at night
Speaker 8: right now, aren't there.
Speaker 7: I don't know that there are a lot of armed people.
Speaker 1: No first thing here. Alito clearly thinks New York City
Speaker 1: is some kind of modern day dodge city. It's not,
Speaker 1: of course. It's one of the safest big cities in
Speaker 1: the country. The number of gun crimes per capita in
Speaker 1: New York City is a fraction of what it is
Speaker 1: in say, Jacksonville, Florida, or New Orleans or Birmingham, Alabama,
Speaker 1: or literally dozens and dozens of other American cities. New
Speaker 1: York City is an exception to the general tide of
Speaker 1: violence in the United States, in part because of the
Speaker 1: law that the bruin case seeks to overturn. But whatever,
Speaker 1: something about the idea of New York City makes Justice
Speaker 1: Alito very nervous, and he thinks, as a result, the
Speaker 1: prudent course for any late night commuter is to be
Speaker 1: packing heat. But underward knows different. There are a lot
Speaker 1: of people on the subway even at midnight. As I
Speaker 1: can say from personal experience, lawyers work late, lots and
Speaker 1: lots of times. She's taken the two, or the three
Speaker 1: or the eight train back home at night. She did
Speaker 1: not find the experience as terrifying as Justice Alito apparently
Speaker 1: believes it to be. And as he's talking, she's clearly
Speaker 1: imagining the alternate universe where Alito gets his way. It's
Speaker 1: late at night. There's a confrontation at one end of
Speaker 1: the car. One guy pulls a gun, because per Justice
Speaker 1: Alito's instructions, he's come prepared for anything untoward happening. In response,
Speaker 1: the other guy pulls his gun. The two of them
Speaker 1: starts shooting, but of course they're terrified, and they're spraying
Speaker 1: bullets everywhere because handguns, as even the most devoted gun
Speaker 1: lover will tell you, are really, really hard to shoot accurately.
Speaker 1: Even under the best of circumstances, with people who know
Speaker 1: what they're doing and practice every day. And these are
Speaker 1: not the best of circumstances. And these are not people
Speaker 1: who practice every day. They are in justice Alito's hypothetical doormen,
Speaker 1: nurses and dishwashers, people who have worked long, hard days
Speaker 1: and are exhausted and have kids at home and don't
Speaker 1: exactly have the time to drive to a shooting range
Speaker 1: every weekend and fire through two hundred rounds. So there's
Speaker 1: bullets everywhere, and everyone else on the train is screaming
Speaker 1: and rushing to one end of the car and hammering
Speaker 1: on the doors and climbing over each other to get out,
Speaker 1: but of course they can't. There's glass everywhere because one
Speaker 1: of those errant shots took out a window, blood on
Speaker 1: the floor. A third person and then a fourth pull
Speaker 1: out their handguns because everyone's gotten a handgun fever. And
Speaker 1: just then the chain goes underneath the East River for
Speaker 1: like two minutes and the lights go out, which they
Speaker 1: sometimes do. I mean, I guarantee you, as someone who
Speaker 1: has taken the subways like Barbara Underwood for most of
Speaker 1: my adult life, this is the number one night mercenario
Speaker 1: of every single New Yorker, but not for Samuel Alito
Speaker 1: of Hamilton Township, New Jersey.
Speaker 7: With illegal guns.
Speaker 8: If what I'm talking about, how many illegal guns were
Speaker 8: seized by the New York Police Department last year? Do
Speaker 8: you have any idea?
Speaker 7: I don't have that number, but I'm sure there's it's
Speaker 7: a substantial number.
Speaker 8: But the people are all these people with illegal guns,
Speaker 8: They are on the subway, they're walking around the streets.
Speaker 8: But the ordinary hardworking law bonding people I mentioned, no,
Speaker 8: they can't be armed.
Speaker 1: Samuel Alito is in the grip of a peculiar and
Speaker 1: powerful fantasy. It says that below the surface of one
Speaker 1: of the safest cities in the country, late at night,
Speaker 1: all rules of civilization have been suspended. You're on your own.
Speaker 1: And Barbara Underwood, who no doubt prepared long and hard
Speaker 1: for this day before the highest court in the land,
Speaker 1: does not seem to have prepared for this. I mean,
Speaker 1: who would How would she have guessed that Samuel Alito
Speaker 1: thinks the A train is lord of the flies?
Speaker 7: Well, I think the subways. When there are problems on
Speaker 7: the subways are protected by the transit police. Is what
Speaker 7: happens because the idea of proliferating arms on the subway
Speaker 7: is precisely I think what terrifies a great many people.
Speaker 7: The other point is that proliferating guns in a populated
Speaker 7: area where there is law enforcement jeopardizes law enforcement because
Speaker 7: when they come, they now can't tell who's shooting, and
Speaker 7: the shooting proliferates and accelerates.
Speaker 1: She's trying really, really hard at this point, not just
Speaker 1: to say, are you effing kidding me, Jersey boy? Have
Speaker 1: you ever ridden a subway before? But Barbara Underwood is
Speaker 1: a lawyer of law experience. Her obligation is to her client,
Speaker 1: not her own mounting feelings of incredulity. So she takes
Speaker 1: a deep breath and holds it in.
Speaker 7: And in the end, that's why there's a substantial law
Speaker 7: enforcement interest in not having widespread caring of guns.
Speaker 1: So here's the puzzle. Where did this completely lunatic idea
Speaker 1: come from? How did Samuel Alito legal powerhouse come up
Speaker 1: with this weird, violent fantasy with the best path to
Speaker 1: ensuring the safety of a subway rider is to encourage
Speaker 1: that rider and all of his fellow commuters to stuff
Speaker 1: a handgun in their waistband and face down their assailant
Speaker 1: Mono Amano on the A train as it passes underneath
Speaker 1: the East River. There are countless law review articles devoted
Speaker 1: to the origins of the American love affair with guns,
Speaker 1: histories of the evolution of our thinking about the Second Amendment.
Speaker 1: When confronted with a powerful idea, we assume that it
Speaker 1: has deep and serious roots. But come on, this isn't
Speaker 1: an idea. It's a fantasy. And where do fantasies come
Speaker 1: from from? The stories were told in childhood. When I
Speaker 1: look at grown up Samuel Alito dreaming about bad guys
Speaker 1: on the A train, I think of little Sammy Alito
Speaker 1: growing up in the nineteen fifties in Hamilton Township, New Jersey,
Speaker 1: and I wonder did he watch one to many episodes
Speaker 1: of gun Smoke, in particular episode eight from season one,
Speaker 1: Kites Reward. In the eighteen seventies, cattle would be herded
Speaker 1: to market from Texas to Kansas up to the so
Speaker 1: called cattle towns that were junction points connected to major
Speaker 1: railway lines. The longest lived and most infamous of those
Speaker 1: cattle towns was Dodge City. It sits on the banks
Speaker 1: of the Arkansas River and was connected by rail to
Speaker 1: the east to Kansas City. In its heyday, Dodge City
Speaker 1: was like Fort Lauderdale during spring break, only with a
Speaker 1: fraction of the girls, just lots of young men, alcohol
Speaker 1: and guns. Hundred full time residents, nineteen bars, filled with
Speaker 1: fortune seekers, buffalo hunters, cowboys, gamblers, desperadoes, what they call
Speaker 1: in Western's hard characters. Here's a typical Dodge City story
Speaker 1: that appeared in the Witchtop Beacon in November of eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy two. Three or four Texas men, the paper reported,
Speaker 1: took over the Kelly and Hunt dance hall. One of
Speaker 1: them made whiskey and sugar free to everybody, while the
Speaker 1: others kept up the dance music and condiments until daylight.
Speaker 1: I think you're getting the picture. The article goes on.
Speaker 1: The dance room was also occupied by a gambling outfit.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, One of the Texas men who were giving
Speaker 1: away the free booze and sugar accuses one of the
Speaker 1: gamblers of cheating end quote, grabbed up the entire wealth
Speaker 1: of the concern to appropriate it unquote, whereupon one of
Speaker 1: the gamblers fractured skull of one of the Texans with
Speaker 1: a six shooter. He dies the cowboys come to the
Speaker 1: aid of their fallen comrade. There's a gun battle, two
Speaker 1: more shot dead, a third wounded. The bodies are thrown
Speaker 1: out onto the street, and here's the crucial detail, the
Speaker 1: party goes merrily on. That's Dodge City. As you can imagine,
Speaker 1: the tabloids of the era couldn't get enough of this.
Speaker 1: The expression, which I'm sure you've heard, We've got to
Speaker 1: get out of Dodge is a reference to Dodge City.
Speaker 1: So what is gun Smoke. It's a TV show set
Speaker 1: in Dodge City, where the hero, Matt Dillon, has the
Speaker 1: job of restoring law and order amidst the mayhem. Every
Speaker 1: other episode begins with a shot of Dylan squaring off
Speaker 1: against a bad guy in the main street of Dodge
Speaker 1: He outdraws him, shoots the bad guy dead. Then after
Speaker 1: the credits, we see Dylan walking through a cemetery where
Speaker 1: all the many dead are buried, and in voiceover, delivering
Speaker 1: a little homily about the enormous weight on his shoulders.
Speaker 5: They all drifted here to Dodge City one time or another.
Speaker 5: The buffalo killers, the saddle bums, the spoilers. It's the
Speaker 5: end of the track and the start of the wilderness,
Speaker 5: the dumping ground of odds and ands and beginnings and leftovers.
Speaker 5: It's a place to stop and take the kind of
Speaker 5: pleasure you need. It's a place to pass through, and
Speaker 5: sometimes it's a place to die.
Speaker 1: So episode eight, Season one, Kite's Reward. The young blonde
Speaker 1: man's name is Andy. He's just shot the stranger dead.
Speaker 1: Dylan has taken his gun. They go back to Dylan's
Speaker 1: office where Andy is giving a lecture.
Speaker 3: Trouble sure come running after you in a hurry, didn't it.
Speaker 4: What's a man supposed to do in this town? Stand
Speaker 4: there and take a belly full of bullets?
Speaker 1: Then Dylan says, I can give you back your gun,
Speaker 1: but I think you shouldn't wear one anymore. You're too
Speaker 1: good with it. You're going to get a reputation. People
Speaker 1: will come after you to see if they can.
Speaker 3: Best you on Sandy. That's happening to you. Anybody who
Speaker 3: can use a gun the way you can has to
Speaker 3: make a choice. You can go on using it, or
Speaker 3: you can quit before you.
Speaker 2: Get blood all of you.
Speaker 1: They have a heart to heart. Dylan is the wise
Speaker 1: father figure Andy clearly never had. Dylan, why don't you
Speaker 1: quit wearing it? Andy, I don't know, I'd feel kind
Speaker 1: of naked, I guess.
Speaker 3: Dylan persists, that's gonna be one man after the other
Speaker 3: from now on. You're gonna have to kill, whether you
Speaker 3: like it or not. But I'm not gonna watch it.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 4: You leave that.
Speaker 3: Gun off, or you get out of dodge and go
Speaker 3: do your killing somewhere else.
Speaker 1: Finally, Andy agrees, unbuckles his gun belt, hands over his
Speaker 1: six shooter and holster. All right, let's pause once again
Speaker 1: because there are so many things to discuss. First of all,
Speaker 1: let's deal with the non trivial matter of the homicide
Speaker 1: that just occurred inside the Long Branch Saloon. To help
Speaker 1: put this event in some kind of statistical perspective, I
Speaker 1: recruited the services of my very able assistant and producer,
Speaker 1: Tali Emma. Okay, so I a couple of weeks ago,
Speaker 1: I gave you an assignment. Just just describe. Describe First
Speaker 1: the assignment.
Speaker 9: So the assignment was to watch Well, first you said
Speaker 9: to watch all of gun Smoke, which is bitish. Yeah,
Speaker 9: it's like twenty seasons something like that. But then the
Speaker 9: assignment turned into watching the first two seasons of gun Smoke.
Speaker 1: Tally ordered the complete Gun Smoke collection on DVD. Do
Speaker 1: you even know what a DVD is?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 1: This is like so prior generation.
Speaker 9: Oh, I grew up watching DVDs.
Speaker 1: Just check just check it.
Speaker 9: But I don't. I don't have a DVD player. So
Speaker 9: I got the DVDs and and then I wound up
Speaker 9: having to watch on my roommate's PS four, which was
Speaker 9: kind of funny.
Speaker 1: This is the first time in human history someone watched
Speaker 1: gun Smoke on a PS four I think it's that station.
Speaker 1: There are thirty nine episodes per season, so Talie watched
Speaker 1: seventy eight in total, a statistically representative sample. Yeah.
Speaker 9: So the assignment was to watch every episode and make
Speaker 9: a note of anytime there's a gun shot and anytime
Speaker 9: there's a homicide. So I counted anytime somebody was killed
Speaker 9: on purpose. So there's a few instances of someone accidentally
Speaker 9: getting shot, and I didn't count that as homicide and was.
Speaker 1: And then you created a kind of an Excel spreadsheet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and in which you also described the nature of the shooting. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: And so give me the give me the bottom line
Speaker 1: on the statistics of number of gunshots and homicides in
Speaker 1: the first two seasons. Of Gun Smoke.
Speaker 9: All right, let me just pull this up really quick, Okay,
Speaker 9: So starting with season one, we had a total of
Speaker 9: two hundred and twelve gun shots in the whole season,
Speaker 9: and this includes gunshots in the air just to scare
Speaker 9: people or something like that. And then of those two
Speaker 9: hundred and twelve, one hundred and thirty two were shots
Speaker 9: specifically pointed at people. There were fifty nine homicides, and
Speaker 9: forty six of those homicides were from gunshots.
Speaker 1: Okay. And then season two.
Speaker 9: So the number of gunshots that I counted for season
Speaker 9: two was one hundred and fifty one. Of those, there
Speaker 9: were fifty two homicides, and of the gunshots in total
Speaker 9: in the season, one hundred and eleven were pointed specifically
Speaker 9: at people.
Speaker 1: As far as I can tell, Tali performed the first
Speaker 1: ever statistically rigorous forensic analysis of the gun Smoke archive,
Speaker 1: you know, telling I went, I used those numbers and
Speaker 1: I calculated independently what the homicide rate per one hundred
Speaker 1: thousand is for the town of Dodge as depicted in
Speaker 1: Gun Smoke, and that works out, given there's twelve hundred
Speaker 1: people in Dodge, a homicide rate of I think forty
Speaker 1: nine hundred and seventeen per hundred thousand, which would be
Speaker 1: like eight times higher than the highest homicide rate in
Speaker 1: any city in the United States. To god, it's like
Speaker 1: the most murderous, it's the most There was one episode
Speaker 1: where eight people were killed.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, that was all it once too. I remember
Speaker 9: that episode.
Speaker 1: That's a mass shooting. Yes, the writers of Gunsmoke were
Speaker 1: committed to portraying Dodge City as a very, very dangerous place.
Speaker 1: Now was dodge in real life that dangerous? Was it
Speaker 1: actually the case that a river of blood flowed through
Speaker 1: the center of Dodge City, Kansas. In the latter half
Speaker 1: of the nineteenth century, there was so much myth making
Speaker 1: that surrounded Dodge City that for the longest time, people
Speaker 1: assumed that the mythical Dodge City and the actual Dodge
Speaker 1: City were the same. This was the wild West. But
Speaker 1: a homicide is a matter of record. Towns, even deeply
Speaker 1: dysfunctional towns, collect death certificates. They have newspapers that report
Speaker 1: on murders, court records that document criminal trials, graveyards where
Speaker 1: people are buried. And in the nineteen sixties, a historian
Speaker 1: named Robert Diykster decided to fact check the claims of
Speaker 1: Dodge City. Here's what he discovered. In eighteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: the year Dodge City was founded, the homicide count was eighteen,
Speaker 1: which in a town of twelve hundred people is nuts,
Speaker 1: but that was before the town had a police force.
Speaker 1: They promptly got themselves a county sheriff, and for the
Speaker 1: next couple of years there are no homicides at all.
Speaker 1: And for the eleven years that follow until the cattle
Speaker 1: trading period ends, Dodge City averages one point six homicides
Speaker 1: a year, which is still a lot for a small town,
Speaker 1: but not that bad for a place that's basically spring
Speaker 1: Break on steroids. The real Dodge City is nothing like
Speaker 1: the mythical Dodge City. The real Dodge City is proof
Speaker 1: that lawn order works. You bring in a lawman and
Speaker 1: the place goes back to normal, which is one hundred
Speaker 1: percent the opposite lesson of television's Dodge City, isn't it
Speaker 1: Gunsmoke says that you can be blessed with a diligent,
Speaker 1: wise rangye, indefatigable, courageous us marshal, the legendary Matt Dillon,
Speaker 1: and he will invariably catch the bad guy and gun
Speaker 1: him down on the street. But at the very thing
Speaker 1: that police are supposed to do and in fact do
Speaker 1: in the real world, that is, stop murders from happening.
Speaker 1: Matt Dillon is helpless. He's the US Marshal for Dodge
Speaker 1: City for twenty seasons, and the bodies just keep piling up.
Speaker 1: He's the head of law enforcement in a town with
Speaker 1: an implied homicide rate eighty times higher than Saint Louis, Missouri,
Speaker 1: the murder capital of the Western world. He's terrible at
Speaker 1: his job. He should have been run out of town,
Speaker 1: and yet he is not, because in the bizarre fantasy
Speaker 1: being peddled by gun Smoke, there are so many bad
Speaker 1: guys and so many guns, and so many shootouts and
Speaker 1: bars that every man must take responsibility for protecting himself.
Speaker 1: If you have a quiet drink at the Long Branch
Speaker 1: saloon and a stranger comes in with an itchy finger,
Speaker 1: you have to be prepared to defend yourself. It's up
Speaker 1: to you, because there's no guarantee that Matt Dillon will
Speaker 1: rush in in time to help you. Now do I
Speaker 1: worry that Lesson reverberated with Little Sammy Alito watching Gun
Speaker 1: Smoke on his parents black and White RCA back in
Speaker 1: Hamilton Downship, New Jersey. Yes, I do. By the way,
Speaker 1: it wasn't just Aledo. Right after Alito goes off on
Speaker 1: his strange rant about the perils of the A train,
Speaker 1: Guess who chimes in justice Brett Cavanaugh. Of course he does.
Speaker 1: Brett Cavanaugh, child of the Washington DC suburbs, whose only
Speaker 1: experience of mass transit was being carpooled to private school
Speaker 1: in the back of his mother's Dodge Mini van.
Speaker 8: What if you're a runner, you say, I run a lot,
Speaker 8: and as you correctly pointed out earlier, there are a
Speaker 8: lot of serious violent crimes on running.
Speaker 7: Pass real problem.
Speaker 1: It's a real problem, just as Kavanaugh now wonders if
Speaker 1: the Runners of New York would be well served stropping
Speaker 1: on a glock in order to defend themselves against the
Speaker 1: murderous grievances of their fellow joggers as they charge their
Speaker 1: way around the Central Park Reservoir. If Barbara Underwood was
Speaker 1: taken aback by sam Aldo, then Kavanagh, I mean, she's like,
Speaker 1: what is happening? She tries to explain. Have you thought
Speaker 1: about what would happen if New York issued a handgun
Speaker 1: to anyone who wanted one.
Speaker 7: The problem with the shall Issho resumes is that they
Speaker 7: multiply the number of firearms that are being carried in
Speaker 7: very densely populated places, and there is a much higher risk.
Speaker 7: Without assuming any ill intent on the part of the
Speaker 7: carriers of weapons, they greatly proliferate the likelihood that mistakes
Speaker 7: will be made, fights will break out.
Speaker 1: Barbara Underwood dearly does not want to find herself in
Speaker 1: the middle of a gun battle when she walks her
Speaker 1: dog around the reservoir on a Sunday morning. But she's
Speaker 1: not up against a rational argument here. She's up against
Speaker 1: a fantasy, a fantasy shared by a whole group of
Speaker 1: middle aged men on the Supreme Court, the fantasies of
Speaker 1: little boys who once spent too many hours in front
Speaker 1: of the television. The heyday of Dodge City, the real
Speaker 1: Dodge City overlaps with the invention of one of the
Speaker 1: most important firearms of that era, maybe one of the
Speaker 1: top five most important weapons ever, the six shooter, patented
Speaker 1: by Samuel Colt, perfected by mister Smith and mister Wesson.
Speaker 10: So revolvers were fairly easy to get by about eighteen
Speaker 10: fifty but by eighteen seven eighteen eighty, you could order
Speaker 10: them for just a few dollars through a catalog. It
Speaker 10: was incredible the number of revolvers that were in that
Speaker 10: were available and circulating in public as compared to decades past.
Speaker 1: That's the historian Brennan reeves the pistols of the early
Speaker 1: nineteenth century were cumbersome, unreliable, inaccurate. People were more worried
Speaker 1: about bowie knives than they were about handguns. The arrival
Speaker 1: of the revolver changed all that. The inventionable weapon with
Speaker 1: a cylinder filled with bullets that rotates every time the
Speaker 1: trigger is pulled, solved every problem that plagued the nineteenth
Speaker 1: century handgun. So you have a proliferation of a gun
Speaker 1: that is a significant innovation. It's cheap, it's effective, it
Speaker 1: does all kinds of other Can you describe a little
Speaker 1: bit the kind of social and political response to the
Speaker 1: proliferation of the revolver.
Speaker 10: Well, a major response from American people was to talk
Speaker 10: about how sad it was that people were being shot
Speaker 10: all the time. You see a tremendous outpouring of sadness
Speaker 10: and frustration that people are being lives are being lost,
Speaker 10: People's lives are being ruined, all as a result of
Speaker 10: someone resorting to using these really deadly weapons. So the
Speaker 10: social response was something that we're not altogether unfamiliar with,
Speaker 10: the primary media of the day talking about and lamenting
Speaker 10: the loss of life as a results of these weapons
Speaker 10: and saying that something should be done.
Speaker 1: Walk walk me through the various strategies that were tried
Speaker 1: in this era in response to the revolver Well.
Speaker 10: The first strategy is what scholars are now calling public
Speaker 10: carry laws, and they started out by prohibiting, in statutory language,
Speaker 10: in clear black and white, you can't carry or conceal
Speaker 10: certain these certain weapons in public spaces, and there would
Speaker 10: be some sort of of a penalty.
Speaker 1: There were laws prohibiting guns from certain sensitive places, taxes
Speaker 1: imposed to make guns more expensive. If we just used
Speaker 1: Texas as our example, So how many of those strategies
Speaker 1: are being deployed in Texas in the latter part of.
Speaker 10: The nineteenth century, I believe all of them, except for
Speaker 10: personal taxation and banning the sale of certain weapons. So
Speaker 10: in Texas there by nineteen hundred, in Texas there was
Speaker 10: a sensitive place's law that was very broad. It covered
Speaker 10: everything from polling places on election days to circuses, any
Speaker 10: public gathering was a disarmed space. There was also a
Speaker 10: public carry law that applied not only to concealed weapons,
Speaker 10: but to openly carried weapons as well, So you could
Speaker 10: not carry a booie knife or a pistol or various
Speaker 10: other concealable deadly weapons in public beyond the confines of
Speaker 10: your own property at all.
Speaker 1: By the turn of the twentieth century, there were also
Speaker 1: taxes on gun dealers and a law against selling arms
Speaker 1: to minors. So Texas gun laws in eighteen ninety are
Speaker 1: way more restricted than they are in twenty twenty three. Yes,
Speaker 1: and is Texas an outlier in those years? There are
Speaker 1: other kind of large states that have similar kind of
Speaker 1: positions on gun violence to that.
Speaker 10: I would not say Texas is an outlier. It was
Speaker 10: a very common approach.
Speaker 1: Huge parts of the country were covered by gun control
Speaker 1: laws in the nineteenth century, laws that would seem unacceptable today.
Speaker 1: That's how much people were spooked by the rise of
Speaker 1: the revolver. There's even a sub specialty of American history
Speaker 1: devoted to digging up all the old gun laws that
Speaker 1: were on the books around this time. Patrick, can you
Speaker 1: do me a favorite? Can you pull up the list
Speaker 1: of cities that you know had discovered had gun control
Speaker 1: ordinances in the late nineteenth century, and just read me,
Speaker 1: read me twenty of the city names.
Speaker 11: I'll go to my appendix. I have these things all
Speaker 11: over the place.
Speaker 1: This is Patrick Charles, one of the leading gun laws sleuths.
Speaker 11: All right, let's go. So, I think great examples are
Speaker 11: you know? So if we go to California, right, We've
Speaker 11: got Sacramento, We've got San Francisco, Santa Barbara, s Angeles, Amida.
Speaker 11: If you go to Kansas, these are cities that probably
Speaker 11: unless you're from Kansas, you don't even know Argentine, Concordian, Coffeeville.
Speaker 11: Then if you go beyond that, I mean we've got
Speaker 11: places such as and Brooklyn was not always part of
Speaker 11: New York City. You've got Brooklyn, You've got Nashville, Tennessee,
Speaker 11: West Missouri, Wheeling, West Virgin Paul, Minnesotaly in Wisconsin's in Illinois.
Speaker 11: There's also Chicago. Oh had it?
Speaker 1: So wait? So sut there guess who else had a
Speaker 1: gun law in place? Dodge City, Kansas. After that first
Speaker 1: murderous season in eighteen seventy two, the town cracked down
Speaker 1: At the bridge over the Arkansas River, which every cowboy
Speaker 1: crossed on his way into Dodge City, there was a
Speaker 1: big sign the carrying of firearms strictly prohibited. The law
Speaker 1: said that you had to check your gun at the
Speaker 1: sheriff's office or town hall or some other designated building.
Speaker 1: One spot was the local brick factory. The owner said
Speaker 1: that at one point he had hundreds of revolvers stacked
Speaker 1: up in his storeroom. You got a chit like a
Speaker 1: coach checked token, which you turned in for your gun
Speaker 1: when you left town. In Dodge City, the penalty for
Speaker 1: breaking that law was one hundred dollars or three months
Speaker 1: in jail, or both. When the murder rate ticked back
Speaker 1: up to one or two a year, the local paper
Speaker 1: got all upset and accused the police of going easy
Speaker 1: on gun owners, like the time when the marshal took
Speaker 1: a gun off a drunken trouble maker in a bar
Speaker 1: and foolishly gave the gun to the man's boss, who
Speaker 1: promptly gave it back to his employee, who then killed somebody.
Speaker 1: Not smart. So gun Smoke comes along in the mid
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties, and in its first season with half the
Speaker 1: country's television audience watching it introduces us to their version
Speaker 1: of Dodge City, the world's most dangerous place, and in
Speaker 1: those first few episodes, it has to deal with the
Speaker 1: question of what Matt Dillon, the symbol of law and authority,
Speaker 1: should do about this extraordinary violence. He can't turn a
Speaker 1: blind eye to it, Kenny, Oh, No, he has to
Speaker 1: take action. They decide to have him try what his
Speaker 1: real life counterparts tried, gun control. So Matt Dillon takes
Speaker 1: away Andy's gun, and Andy is transformed. Our blonde haired
Speaker 1: gunman gets a job of the local stables. The owner
Speaker 1: loves him, says, I wish he was my son. We
Speaker 1: see Andy at the local saloon, having a single chased beer,
Speaker 1: chatting politely with the beautiful proprietress. A bully challenges him
Speaker 1: to a fistfight. Andy drops him with a punch. Matt
Speaker 1: Dillon looks on admiringly because he has liberated Andy from
Speaker 1: his gun. Dylan has been given moral purpose, Andy has
Speaker 1: been given redemption. Both men see a way forward out
Speaker 1: of the unrelenting bleakness that is Dodge City.
Speaker 4: You know something, Marshall, boy, he was right about me
Speaker 4: not wearing a gun.
Speaker 6: I'm glad I took it off.
Speaker 1: You was right about me not wearing a gun. But
Speaker 1: then commercial break and when we come back, a stranger
Speaker 1: shows up in Dodge City asking after Andy. Says, Andy's
Speaker 1: in outlaw. Says Andy used to be part of the
Speaker 1: Fisher gang down in Laramie, Wyoming. There's a bounty on
Speaker 1: his head one thousand dollars to get or alive. The
Speaker 1: stranger finds Andy in the stables, says you're coming with me.
Speaker 1: Andy says no way. Andy goes for his gun, but
Speaker 1: he's got no gun. Matt Dylon took it. He grabs
Speaker 1: it air and the bounty hunter shoots him in the chest.
Speaker 1: Matt Dylan rushes in too late. He goes to the
Speaker 1: stricken Andy lying on the ground.
Speaker 6: I forgot I forgot about my gun. I went for
Speaker 6: remembered didn't work out so good, just because I've forgotten fad.
Speaker 1: He dies and the bounty hunter turns to Matt Dylan.
Speaker 7: They went for his gun.
Speaker 2: I had a Killain.
Speaker 1: Dylan is gazing, grief stricken into the endless prairie horizon.
Speaker 2: Now you didn't kill him? What I killed him?
Speaker 1: And somewhere in the suburbs of Hamilton Township. Little Sammy Alito,
Speaker 1: already dreaming of one day wearing the long black robes
Speaker 1: of the High Court, learns a lesson he will never forget.
Speaker 1: Guns don't kill people. Gun controlled US, our revisionist history
Speaker 1: Gun series was produced by Jacob Smith, Bend Adaph Haffrey,
Speaker 1: Piara Powell, Tally, Emlyn and Leeman Gistoo. We were edited
Speaker 1: by Peter Clowney and Julia Barton. Fact checking by Arthur
Speaker 1: Gombert's and Cashel Williams. Original scoring by the Risquerra, mastering
Speaker 1: by FLONN Williams. Engineering by Nina Lawrence. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.