I am sorry Red, but I have to burst that bubble.
The "Good Old Days" are just another escapist fantasy.

If you look at the historic crime rates and examine what the crimes were they were much higher at a lot of times and in a lot of places than they are now.

When you hear about historic crime sprees remember you are only hearing about the ones that were bad enough to remember for more than 100 years, ones bad enough to be reported nation wide at a time that mass media hardly existed.

You are not hearing about the countless local robberies and small murders earlier times were plagued with.
(When you hear about smaller towns being safer that is another fantasy too. Assault rates are higher in small towns.)

The idea that everybody was walking around armed to the teeth is a bit false too. Guns might not have been illegal, but they didn't have to be.
Guns were very expensive items and so was ammunition. People could not afford to be armed like they are now.

Anyway, crime rates change and nobody really knows why.

Since 1990 the violent crime rate has been dropping, in spite of all the scary stories in the media, and it has nothing to do with gun ownership levels.

Nobody has been able to link it with anything else either. Not even to the population getting older or to the police being better equipped.

When you hear that they hanged horse thieves all that means is there was enough horse theft that they resorted to drastic measures in an attempt to reduce horse thievery.