I always thought guns were actually pretty rare in the old west. Most people were subsistence farmers or ranchers.
Based on period photos, most people rarely if ever open-carried on their hip like in movies and on TV (at least in town), but guns in general weren't exactly rare, or so I'd imagine. I think it'd be weird for relatively self-sufficient people to live on the frontier without the most effective means of defense from hostile people and animals, especially with law enforcement being extremely limited to nonexistent. If the typical household back then didn't at least have one firearm, then culturally people must have been more anti-gun then than now, which I doubt.
Ammo was prolly too expensive to practice much.
There seem to be extremely few references to the price of metallic cartridges in the Old West, but from what I've gathered over the years, it was about a dollar a box or so for .45 Colt. That's more or less in line with what factory ammo in that caliber costs today, which is more than the cost of common calibers but not completely outrageous. Of course, those who shot more than most back then probably reloaded, as many do today. And as pointed out earlier, cap & ball revolvers were still pretty popular in the Old West, and were probably a lot less expensive to shoot.
And, no, I have no citations to back up my opinions.
I remember reading a lot of things, but I don't have any specific citations, either.
I do scratch my head as to how we conclude that gun violence in the old west was a myth,,,
Gun violence in the Old West certainly wasn't a myth, but I think that many notions people have today about the overall level of gun violence back then are exaggerated. In particular, I highly doubt that the lives of most people constantly revolved around guns and gunfights back then, as some people today might imagine (based on entertainment media). As pointed out earlier, most shootings were considered self-defense shootings, and the same is probably true today. Bandits shooting people and each other in the wilderness has been replaced by gang shootings in inner cities. Perhaps shootings were under-reported in the Old West, hence the lower rates of murder by firearms, but at worst I doubt that the real rates were higher than those of today. In my lay opinion, the idea that gun violence was horrendous in the Old West by today's standards is a myth.