"The great example, in the 1850s you have a school teacher who’s teaching. A guy — he’s out in the West — this guy from New England wants to kill him and find him. So he comes into the school with his gun to shoot the teacher, he decides not to shoot the teacher because all the kids pull their guns out and point it at him and say, ‘You kill the teacher, you die.’ He says, ‘Okay.’ The teacher lives. Real simple stuff. Saved the life of — there was no shooting because all the kids — we’re talking in elementary school — all the kids pull their guns out and says, ‘We like our teacher. You shoot our teacher, we’ll kill you.’”"

It’s pretty inspiring, isn’t it? And absolutely true, because David Barton is a real historian and all. Chris Rodda, who has made something of a second career out of fact-checking Barton, suspected that the story might be bogus, but since Barton seldom names his sources, Rodda doubted heshe*would be able to determine one way or another. But then a commenter on her blog pointed out the similarities to the L’Amour novel, which Rodda snapped up online.

Turns out that the plot involves a gunfighter named Drake Morrell, who escapes a death sentence for murder and assumes a new identity as a teacher in Wyoming. And sure enough, an Easterner named Stacy Follett tracks down Morrell to avenge the deaths of two friends many years before.

Goodness.  It would seem that when looking for Big Damn Hero stories for the gun people, you have to go way way back, into the fiction section.