Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, during a press conference about the Tucson shootings, called Arizona “the Tombstone of the United States.” 
 
 Some journalists gave the word a lowercase “t,” but the sheriff was clearly referring to the infamous silver-mining town 70 miles from Tucson — site of the shootout at the OK Corral. 
 
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 reset POLITICO 44 
 
 As bloggers and journalists invoke the hoary image of “frontier violence” and “Arizona’s poisonous political rhetoric,” it is not that surprising it took less than a day to mention Arizona’s most infamous bloodshed—and from a local sheriff no less. 
 
 The irony of Dupnik’s remark is that Tombstone lawmakers in the 1880s did more to combat gun violence than the Arizona government does today. 
 
 For all the talk of the “Wild West,” the policymakers of 1880 Tombstone—and many other Western towns—were ardent supporters of gun control. When people now compare things to the “shootout at the OK Corral,” they mean vigilante violence by gunfire. But this is exactly what the Tombstone town council had been trying to avoid. 
 
 In late 1880, as regional violence ratcheted up, Tombstone strengthened its existing ban on concealed weapons to outlaw the carrying of any deadly weapons within the town limits. The Earps (who were Republicans) and Doc Holliday maintained that they were acting as law officers—not citizen vigilantes—when they shot their opponents. That is to say, they were sworn officers whose jobs included enforcement of Tombstone’s gun laws. 
 
 Today, in contrast, Arizonans can legally buy guns without licenses, and are able to carry concealed weapons without a permit. The state bans cities from passing their own, stricter laws. The legislature will consider a bill this session that would force schools to allow guns on campus — like Pima Community College, which the alleged shooter attended. 
 
 There are comparisons between the horror that unfolded in Tucson on Saturday morning, and the bloodshed on that cold October day in Tombstone, 130 years ago. 
 
 Vitriolic politics served as the backdrop in both cases. Most historians of the Shootout at the OK Corral now agree that partisan divisions between the mostly Republican Earp faction and the Southern Democrat Clantons and McLaurys helped stir the pot. The violence can be viewed as a last battle of the Civil War — the bloodiest political conflict of them all. 
 
 Arizonans, myself included, love to tout their vaunted independence and Western values. But when we perpetuate the idea that Arizona is some unchanging Wild West, we fall into the trap of a myth that only serves to embolden those who refuse to support commonsense restrictions on purchasing firearms. 
 
 Even the Tombstone town council of 1880 realized that some people with guns have intent to kill—and that reasonable laws could help stop them. 
 
 Katherine Benton-Cohen, an Arizona native and history professor at Georgetown University, is the author of “Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands.” ||||| Chip Somodevilla / Getty A Glock 19 handgun, like the one Jared Lee Loughner allegedly used in a Jan. 8, 2011, shooting spree in Tucson, Ariz. 
 
 When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the handgun ban in the nation's capital in 2008, Representative Gabrielle Giffords applauded the ruling, calling gun ownership "an Arizona tradition." That she had co-signed a congressional amicus brief against the ban came as no surprise: she has always been pro-gun, and she represents a state with a history of proud gun ownership and lax gun laws. 
 
 So there is at least a touch of irony to the fact that her name is being invoked, following her attempted assassination on Saturday, in calls for tighter gun control. Paul Helmke, head of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, offered prayers for Giffords and decried "easy access to high-powered guns." New York Representative Carolyn McCarthy called the shooting "an illustration of why we must all work together to fight gun violence in America and keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of the wrong people." (See one survivor's account of the Tucson massacre.) 
 
 Gun-rights supporters see a different moral to the shooting. "It shows more than ever why people need to have the tools of defense," says Charles Heller, founder of the Arizona Citizens Defense League. As for additional gun-control laws, Heller says, "It doesn't need to be any more illegal than it already is to shoot a Congresswoman in the head." (See TIME's photoessay "Mourning the Victims of the Arizona Shooting.") 
 
 The real question in Tucson, though, is why the alleged shooter, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, was allowed to buy the murder weapon in the first place. Beyond the clearly delusional nature of online videos ascribed to him, Loughner was suspended last year from Pima Community College apparently because of mental problems. According to the college, he was told he could return only if he obtained "a mental health clearance indicating, in the opinion of a mental health professional, his presence at the College does not present a danger to himself or others." The Army also denied Loughner's application for unspecified reasons. It's unclear what other organizations or agencies might have been aware of Loughner's dangerous mental state. Still, he passed a background check, and late last year legally bought the 9-mm Glock 19 semiautomatic handgun allegedly used in the shootings. (Read "What Motivated Giffords' Shooter?") 
 
 As far back as the Gun Control Act of 1968, there have been federal laws against selling weapons to mentally ill individuals. But the Virginia Tech tragedy in 2007, in which the shooter Cho Seung-Hui was able to pass two federal gun background checks even after a state court ruled that he was dangerously mentally ill, highlighted the need for better record-keeping and interagency communication to enforce those laws. (More than 30 people died in the incident.) Saying that unstable individuals are disqualified from buying firearms is meaningless if the national background-check system, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), has no record of their illness. That's why the Brady organization was proud to announce on Friday, just a day before the Tucson shootings, that the number of records of mental illness in the NICS database had more than doubled since Virginia Tech, to more than 1 million records. (See TIME's complete coverage of the Tucson shooting.) 
 
 But there's a problem with that: there should be more than 2 million records in that database, if all the states cooperated fully. According to the Brady organization's records, Arizona was not even the worst offender  at least the state ramped up its reporting somewhat in the wake of Virginia Tech. But still, Arizona's own estimate is that the state has 121,700 records of disqualifying mental illness that should go into the NICS database. From the beginning of 2008 to October 2010, however, it submitted only 4,465 records. Worse than Arizona were states like Louisiana, which submitted only one record during that time frame, and Nebraska and Pennsylvania, which didn't submit any. (Did violent rhetoric contribute to the Giffords attack?) 
 
 The battle over gun control is not often fought in the bureaucracy, however. It's fought in the public square. Saturday's shooting comes after several years of increasingly high-profile appearances by armed Second Amendment supporters at political events. In August 2009, at the height of the health care reform furor, a man showed up at a speech President Obama gave to veterans in Phoenix with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle slung around his shoulder. That same month, a protester outside an Obama town-hall meeting in New Hampshire wore a handgun strapped to his leg and carried a sign that said, "It's time to water the tree of liberty," a reference to Thomas Jefferson, who suggested that particular tree should be watered with blood. 
 
 In the end, however, what those protesters demonstrated  safely, as it turned out  was that they could bring properly licensed weapons to political events without endangering the public. Gun-control advocates may see the Tea Party protesters as the face of provocation, but it's the quiet, grim paranoiacs like Loughner who represent the real danger. 
 
 Loughner, according to eyewitnesses, hid his weapon until the moment before he opened fire. But his mental illness had been on display for many to see in the weeks and months before the shooting. So Giffords' gun politics are not relevant at the moment, nor are the larger questions of liberty or societal violence. The most pressing questions now: Who else knew of Loughner's mental illness? What obligations did his college have, and which ones did they fulfill, to report Loughner to other agencies? Most of all: Why is Arizona (along with other states) so far behind in reporting disqualifying mental illness to the federal background-check system? If there is anything that both sides should be able to agree on, it's that unstable individuals should not have access to any kind of weapon, much less the so-called fourth-generation semiautomatic Glock 19 that Loughner bought. This time, the price for bureaucratic torpor was too high. 
 
 Read about the link between marijuana and schizophrenia.
– Following Saturday’s tragic shootings, the Pima County sheriff referred to Arizona as “the Tombstone of the United States,” a clear reference to the silver-mining town that played host to the OK Corral shootout some 130 years ago. "The irony of (his) remark," writes Katherine Benton-Cohen on Politico, “is that Tombstone lawmakers in the 1880s did more to combat gun violence than the Arizona government does today. For all the talk of the ‘Wild West,’ the policymakers of 1880 Tombstone—and many other Western towns—were ardent supporters of gun control.” In fact, when they engaged in the shootout, the Earps and Doc Holliday were law officers enforcing Tombstone’s gun laws—which included a ban on concealed weapons. Today, not only can Arizonans purchase guns without licenses, they can also carry concealed weapons without permits. “Even the Tombstone town council of 1880 realized that some people with guns have intent to kill—and that reasonable laws could help stop them," Benton-Cohen concludes. (Jared Loughner, especially, shouldn't have been allowed to own a gun, considering he was suspended from college due to mental problems—click for Nathan Thornburgh's entire piece on that, in Time.)