|WYOMING has recently been a great sufferer, mainly through the carrying
of revolvers in the caboose of the overalls. There is no more need of
carrying a revolver in Wyoming than there is of carrying an upright
piano in the coat tail pocket. Those who carry revolvers generally die
by the revolver, and he who agitates the six-shooter, by the six-shooter
shall his blood be shed. When a man carries a gun he does so because he
has said or done something for which he expects to be attacked, so it is
safe to say that when a man goes about our peaceful streets, loaded, he
has been doing some, little trick or other, and has in advance prepared
himself for a Smith-&-Wesson matinee. The other class of men who suffer
from the revolver comprises the white-livered and effeminate parties
who ought to be arrested for wearing men's clothes, and who never shoot
anybody except by accident. Fortunately they sometimes shoot themselves,
and then the fool-killer puts his coat on and rests half an hour. We
have been writing these things and obituaries alternately for several
years, and yet there is no falling off in the mortality. For every man
who is righteously slain, there are about a million law-abiding men,
women and children murdered. Eternity's parquette is filled with people
who got there by the self-cocking revolver route.
A man works twenty years to become known as a scholar, a newspaper man
and a gentleman, while the illiterate murderer springs into immediate
notoriety in a day, and the widow of his victim cannot even get her life
insurance. These things are what make people misanthropic and tenacious
of their belief in a hell.
If revolvers could not be sold for less than $500 a piece, with a
guarantee on the part of the vendee, signed by good sureties, that he
would support the widows and orphans, you would see more longevity lying
around loose, and western cemeteries would cease to roll up such mighty
majorities.