[driftless2]

If you're going for historical accuracy concerning westerns, you might as well rip the whole lie about quickdraw gunfights, the staple of a great many tv and movie westerns. There never were any quickdraw killers ala Broderick Crawford in "The Fastest Gun Alive." The whole quickdraw thing was made up by western fabulists and the entertainment industry. There were certainly plenty of killers and other people handy with a six-gun. But if they wanted to kill someone, they didn't challenge them to a fast-draw contest. They usually had their guns out and pointing at the person they were trying to shoot.

Ditto for shooting from the hip. Experts say you couldn't hit anything with the revolvers of that era unless you aimed it. And no one shot the revolver out the hands of the bad guy ala The Lone Ranger and countless other good guys.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

***If you’re going for historical accuracy concerning westerns, you might as well rip the whole lie about quickdraw gunfights,****

How true! I live the old westerns of the 1950s even though they are inacurate. I enjoy the Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea movies better than John Wayne.

I saw one western not long ago in which Indians who were always friends with the US were on the warpath with the US. They even named the tribes! Poncas, Pawnees, Otoes, all joining their traditional enemies to fight the US. I couldn’t believe the inacuracies but it was still a fun movie!

[MarkL]

If you're going for historical accuracy concerning westerns, you might as well rip the whole lie about quickdraw gunfights, the staple of a great many tv and movie westerns. There never were any quickdraw killers ala Broderick Crawford in "The Fastest Gun Alive." The whole quickdraw thing was made up by western fabulists and the entertainment industry. There were certainly plenty of killers and other people handy with a six-gun. But if they wanted to kill someone, they didn't challenge them to a fast-draw contest. They usually had their guns out and pointing at the person they were trying to shoot.

This was a really excellent back-story in "Unforgiven" with Gene Hackman and Richard Harris, where Hackman's character sets Harris' "biographer" straight about an event he had "documented."

Ditto for shooting from the hip. Experts say you couldn't hit anything with the revolvers of that era unless you aimed it. And no one shot the revolver out the hands of the bad guy ala The Lone Ranger and countless other good guys.

From what I've been told, once the Colt SAA revolver came out, it was pretty accurate from the outset. And there have been and are some shooters who were perfectly capable of accurate shooting from the hip. The late Bill Jordon (with the US Border Patrol) was a very good example.

Mark