What Killed the Duel?
12th January 2016
Eric S Raymond has an interesting take.
I’m bringing this up now because I want to put a stake in the ground. I have a personal theory about why Europo-American dueling largely (though not entirely) died out between 1850 and 1900 that I think is at least as well justified as the conventional account, and I want to put it on record.
January 12th, 2016 at 09:52
The author misses the invention of Sam Colt. Once you moved from a single shot pistol to the ability to fire 5 more rounds quickly, dueling moved into a whole new level of trouble. Historically, the “fastest gun” wasn’t the most important survival factor; the ability to reload was. That helped the popularity of the Remington 1858 pistol, which let you replace the cylinder instead of reloading each chamber. When Smith & Wesson drilled out the cylinder so the shooter could use cartridges, reloading became easy and even more bullets could be launched during the firefight. That many stray bullets became a problem for everyone else in town and dueling became socially unacceptable. (Being the good old days, that meant it was ok to shoot the shooters and put a stop to the nonsense.) Dueling was illegal in most areas as far back as the 1700’s, but if you shot someone and left the area, who was going to find you? Once wanted posters started including pictures it became pretty difficult to evade the law. The author’s point remains the same: technology killed the duel, not morality.