"The issue of restrictions on guns in terms of carrying should be left up to local control," Hatch said. "I believe in the Old West thing - there's a sign at the front of the town saying, 'Check your guns before you enter.' "I've seen variations of this statement before and suspect much of it is movie fiction assumed to be true. I'd heard that the Earps imposed disarmament in Tombstone, but I don't know how much of that is movie lore vs actual historically-recorded law. I did find this reference to the "Dead Line" in Dodge. Brutal--shooting armed citizens on sight "if an officer was so inclined, and meant certain arrest." That's what Utah's latter day gungrabbers seem intent on emulating.
I confess ignorance here, and wonder who has done research on gun control in the Old West to know if this was a common occurrence or a rarity, and whether or not local edicts would have been backed by state or territorial law if challenged. Is there an authority on frontier gun laws?
I put the question to Clayton Cramer, who offered:
I've long been curious about this. It is clearly the case that some frontier law officers imposed such rules to deal with drunken cowboys. I don't know how common such laws were; they have left very little case law for the Wild West era. There is a bit of case law from the close of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century--and generally, local laws completely banning carrying of guns didn't do well. For example, Lewiston, Idaho, had a ban on carrying of guns in town, struck down by the Idaho Supreme Court case In re Brickey (Ida. 1902).
State v. Rosenthal (Vt. 1903) struck down a similar Rutland ordinance. City of Salina v. Blaksley (Kan. 1905) is one of the relatively few such bans of that period that survived court challenge. You can find other examples of the period in _For the Defense of Themselves and the State_.