How good were gunslingers really

I'd say the ones you've heard of were pretty good. The ones you haven't weren't. The modern mindset is "I'll shoot you if I have to", the mindset then would have been "I'll shoot you the first good chance I get".

Way more people got shot in the back, from the bushes, than ever stepped out into the street at high noon. If you really wanted to kill someone, why in the heck would you ever give them a chance to kill you first?

My primary area of interest seems to predate yours. It's the colonial frontier that I'm fascinated with. I can tell you this, the level of violence that people became accustomed to is at a point that few people not raised in that scenario could ever deal with.

For instance, a few years ago I came across a diary entry (going off memory here) of a 15 year old boy who had killed his first indian. He was lamenting the fact that he was 15 and had only killed one but that the neighbor boy was a year older and had killed 6. The last sentence in that entry said "I got to get busy".

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How good were gunslingers really