With their origins in Southern California in the early 1980s, Cowboy Action Shooting events, sponsored by the Single Action Shooting Society (or SASS), the sport’s governing and sanctioning body, invite participants to compete in live-round target shooting for accuracy and speed with period or replica firearms. The competitions take place in sets and scenarios inspired by TV and movie westerns, with characteristic props, clothing, and food. By engaging in shooting, social events. and costume contests, participants seek to directly experience “what it was like” to be a “cowboy” or “cowgirl” in the frontier West. Although these historical “Old West” target shooting competitions now take place in several places worldwide, they have contemporary political importance today in the United States, where history has moved to the center of the nation’s gun debate.
The critical examination of Cowboy Action Shooting provides a rich example of how history can be transformed into rituals that shape contemporary social and political life. Reenactments of the frontier west, complete with cowboy shootouts on main streets, reproduce a narrative of history that is widely accepted by millions of people. Yet the historians, curators, and librarians who preserve and interpret the history of the West in accordance with the disciplinary standards of their fields concur that the shootouts and their corresponding narrative of rugged outlaws, vigilante justice, rugged individualism, celebrity guns, and the inevitability of gun violence obscure the realities of western history. In fact, the West was a hotbed of gun regulation activism, not just “shoot-em-up” justice, and the iconic gunfights pale in comparison to the scale of carnage, casualties, and shots fired in today’s mass shootings.
These reenactments do, however, tell us a great deal about historical memory by offering opportunities to explore why the scripted contest between “good guys” in white cowboy hats and “bad guys” in black ones still resonates so strongly with Americans. Unfortunately, white triumphalism and a celebration of American imperialism undergird this popular misremembering of the Old West as a place where the person with the fastest draw was necessarily heroic. How and why do appeals to “authenticity”—a common value in a variety of popular historical reenactment traditions—matter in the particular domain of popular “Old West” shooting sports? What role do “Old West” shooting competitions play in America’s gun debate?