1884 New York Street Car Scene Shows Carry of Pistols Common Before 1911

AmmoLand ^ | Dean Weingarten

[marktwain]

A version of the above image was published in the April 19, 1884 issue of the National Police Gazzette. The publisher was located at Franklin Square and Dover Street, New York. The location is in Manhattan, New York City.

The probably earlier version, shown above, is found in The Remington Historical Treasury of American Guns, published in 1966, taken from the New York Public Library Picture Collection.

Harper’s publishing house is shown at the Franklin Square location in this map from January of 1885.

In 1884, cable car lines were just starting to be considered in New York City, and electric trolleys were not yet in use. The street car in the image was almost certainly a horse-drawn street car, which existed in New York City until 1917.

The relevance of the image is pistols were commonly carried in New York City for self-defense in close proximity to the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. Only six passengers are shown seated in the street car. Of those, four are not obscured by other people. All four of the unobscured passengers are shown as carrying pistols or revolvers in the illustration.

Public transportation was not considered to be a “sensitive location” where arms were not permitted.

The street car image was likely created before 1884; even so, 1884 is only 14 years after the Fourteenth Amendment was passed. There was no controversy. One of the major purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment was to ensure everyone in the USA had an enforceable right to keep and bear arms. One of the co-sponsors of the amendment pontificated on exactly that purpose.

[BrandtMichaels]

In programming we often put a dash thru a zero to avoid confusing it with the letter ‘O’ 1988 shows as 1908 but what’s even more confusing is the graph has zeros (both with/without slashes) and ‘O’s, yet a trained eye detects their uniqueness of each.

I warned you though trivia’s trivia = minutiae.

[marktwain]

Thanks.

I did not detect that.

[marktwain]

I looked at the depiction of the graph on my screen.

All the numbers are clear in it.

All the zeros are zeros. All the eights are eights.

I do not see any letter Os at all.

I wonder if different systems are displaying the graph differently.