Wyoming Firearms History
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Spent some time reading through Wyoming's firearms history, and a few things in here are worth chewing on — especially for folks who think they already know this story.
The mythology of every man armed in every Wyoming town simply doesn't match the documentary record of what those early communities actually wanted.
Cheyenne passed a firearms ordinance 88 days after the town was designated. Worland's council — cattlemen and pioneer businessmen, not exactly anti-gun types — unanimously passed a carry ban as their ninth order of business. The "Wild West" image that drives half the conversation around gun rights today was largely a Buffalo Bill production, not a documentary record.
Large cattle operators, organized as the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, hired approximately 25 Texas gunmen and several association members to invade Johnson County and kill alleged rustlers and homesteaders.
The Johnson County War doesn't fit neatly into any modern political frame — the armed side with institutional backing and political cover lost the public confrontation and still faced zero consequences. Worth remembering when you hear anyone claim that the historical frontier was some kind of natural-law firearms paradise. It was messy, it was class warfare, and the governor ran interference for the invaders.
At peak deployment, Warren AFB controlled Minuteman III ICBMs spread across 12,600 square miles of southeastern Wyoming, northeastern Colorado, and western Nebraska.
Most people driving through Cheyenne don't think much about F.E. Warren, but that installation is sitting on one of the largest deployed nuclear arsenals on the planet. Wyoming's relationship with "firearms" technically extends to intercontinental ballistic missiles — which puts the permitless carry debate in a slightly different scale of perspective.
The 2021 session extended permitless carry to non-residents as well, effective July 1, 2021.
That extension to non-residents is the detail that most people miss. You can be passing through from California on a hunting trip, stop in Cody, and legally carry concealed the whole time — no permit, no Idaho enhanced, nothing. That's a significant practical reality for anyone who travels through Wyoming regularly.
Given that early Wyoming towns were actively passing carry restrictions while simultaneously living through genuine frontier violence — what do you think those early settlers understood about the relationship between armed communities and functional civic life that gets lost in the modern debate?
Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team
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