Lucas: Maybe so son, but it will take a lot of changing to make them give up their guns.
Mark: Yeah but I think it will happen. You know someday I think this street right here will have buildings that stick up right to the sky. And we'll have machines that will take the place of horses. Like the train took the place of the covered wagon.
The episode ends with father and son laughing at the boy's silly idea that machines could somehow take the place of horses. Ha!
The screenwriter went to some effort to work up a good literary explanation advocating gun control, even right after he's just portrayed something dramatically expressing why it wouldn't work. See, people are going to do a lot of changing. Things progress. It's just like how covered wagons gave way to trains, and the future implication of cars and tractors that would soon be replacing their horses.
But this whole childlike/childish vision is based on false analogy. Cars are different equipment than horses, and they run completely differently. That's an upgrade to completely different technology.
Whereas people remain people. Essentially, Arthur Browne is arguing for the malleability of human nature - a central tenet of modern socialist type liberals. Whereas I'm not buying much of that. Human beings looks like will always be mammals, with basic adaptive mammalian nervous systems.
We might do better at encouraging our best angels and suppressing our demons, but in all likelihood there will always be some percentage of people who are wicked and predatory, from whom we need to be able to protect ourselves. Now, perhaps future generations will somehow evolve into Stanley Kubrick's Starchild and we won't need guns - but I wouldn't be counting on it any time in the next couple of thousand years. Even Jesus couldn't change human nature.
Finally, I want to send some love to this cowgirl Margie what runs this insanely complete site for The Rifleman. She appears to have detailed episode recaps voiced as Lucas and pictures for each of the 168 episodes.
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