Yancy Derringer’s Fancy Derringer

"Cause if they didn't, they died..."

(Steve McQueen, “Wanted Dead or Alive”)

Much has been written recently about grooming. I don’t mean flossing, bathing regularly or scraping the gray-green crud from under your fingernails.

I’m talking about the act of employing manipulative behaviors to groom the young and vulnerable. It’s an insidious thing, an evil thing.

Maybe I should have spoken up sooner, but I think someone was grooming me – indeed, my whole generation - back in the 1960s, and now we’re seeing the results.

Back then, every kid I knew lived on a relentless diet of black and white Westerns. If my parents had allowed me, I would have watched those shows from the time the tubes in our old Sylvania TV warmed up, until the broadcast day ended with the nightly Star-Spangled Banner.

We grew up on shows from Warner Brothers, Disney and other major production houses. The coin of the realm was Westerns. Good guys against bad guys, and it was pretty easy to tell which was which. The good guys looked like me.

The cowboy heroes of my youth carried guns, but not just any guns. They had to have super guns. Gimmick guns. Guns you could copy as toys and sell to kids.

It probably began innocently enough, with the Lone Ranger and his silver bullets. That ammo, which I believe he ordered in bulk from Tiffany, was flashy, but not quite over the top.

From there, it grew into guns that were unrealistic and often just plain daffy, but which were a lot more fun than just shooting bad guys with plain vanilla six-shooters.

(Wyatt Earp and the Buntline Special)

You take Wyatt Earp, and his “Buntline Special.” Earp was a real person, but historians debate whether he really used a revolver with a twelve-inch barrel, supposedly made for him by a self-promoting dime novelist named Ned Buntline.

Who the hell would even want such a thing, they ask, when it would take so much longer to remove it from your holster?

Still, the Wyatt Earp TV show was so popular that the Colt gunmakers actually began producing Buntlines for sale after the television series premiered. It was life imitating art.

If you were a character in a Western and you just bought an off-the-rack gun at the dry goods store, then you deserved to be shot by a hero with a gimmick gun. It served you right for not arming yourself down at the novelty shop, where you could also pick up some itching powder and fake barf.

If you think I’m exaggerating, consider a few quick examples, just off the top of my head. No research required, because I don’t get paid to do research.

Think about how these heroes looked to impressionable 12-year-olds, and whether somebody may have been grooming us.

Wanted Dead or Alive: Steve McQueen, the ultimate cool actor, got his start in this show. He carried a rifle that he had converted to a pistol. Why you would take a good rifle, cut down the barrel, shorten the stock and then put it in an inconvenient holster? I guess for the same reason you would put bullets in your ammo belt that wouldn’t actually fit the gun, just because they looked more bad-ass.

Johnny Ringo carried a LeMat, a gun that actually existed and was used in small numbers during the Civil War. It was a revolver, but there was an extra barrel underneath the normal one that worked as a shotgun. The bad guys would count the bullets he fired, and then say, “You’re empty, Johnny, now we’ve got you!” Then they would be blown away by the shotgun blast, week after week after week.

(Johnny Ringo’s LeMat - A barrel of fun?)

It was clear that the gun was the star of the show, right from the opening credits. From Wikipedia’s description of this show: “Many episodes found Ringo getting into scrapes where that final round in the shotgun barrel was the deciding factor.”

That’s an understatement.

 (Yancy Derringer’s four-barreled Sharps)

Yancy Derringer: He carried a four-barrel Sharps up his sleeve, an ineffectual toy with a range of maybe a foot. I guess if you were called Yancy, you’d better have something up your sleeve.

In fairness, Yancy did have backup in the form of Pahoo, a huge Pawnee man who went everywhere with him and carried a shotgun and a deadly throwing knife. Pahoo shot the bad guys as they doubled over laughing at Yancy’s tiny pistol.

(What’s up with your hat, Tex?)

Texas John Slaughter made 'em do what they oughta,
’Cause, if they didn't, they died"

Those actual lyrics are from Texas John Slaughter’s tasteless theme song. Isn’t this the very description of a brutal despot?

Texas John wore his white Stetson with the brim pinned straight up, just like the village idiot. He wore his holster on the wrong side, so he had to reach his hand across his entire body in order to draw. I don’t know why.

Oh. Do you remember The Rifleman? Don’t even get me started. on that one! I got nothing to add to the opening credits…

Thinking back on it, there were subtle themes that I didn’t  notice in my youth. Many of these guys were former Confederate soldiers. Yancy Derringer’s family had even owned a plantation!

Hold the phone! They owned a WHAT?

A number of the Western heroes were quiet loners, and we all know what eventually happens to quiet loners when you give them guns, especially novelty guns.

(Bob’s sweater and gun collection)

Is it any wonder my generation grew up wanting more and more firepower? I can’t prove these 1960s Westerns made for a more violent America, but just take a look at where we are now, in the 2020s….

As for me and shooting, there isn’t much to say. The Army taught me to handle an M-16, even in fully automatic mode, and a few weeks in Basic Training was more than enough for me. I don’t have the urge to take one of them along with me today to shop at Whole Foods.

A postscript: Atypically, those shows did leave me wanting to grow up and have a huge antique gun collection. In grade school, I spoke of little else.

Finally, at age 31, when I was a Reuters journalist in New York City, I went to a Christie’s auction and bought my first, and last, antique gun. It was a Colt Civil War era percussion revolver. I bid against other buyers, and everything. The start of my collection.

That is proudly displayed by itself, in my sweater drawer, just where it belongs.

Come visit - the museum is open whenever I need a clean sweater.