President Eliot still did not admire him, although when Roosevelt came to Cambridge in 1905 for his twenty-fifth reunion Eliot had felt obliged to invite him to stay at his house. On his arrival, perspiring and in need of a wash, Roosevelt pulled off his coat, rolled it up and flung it across the bedroom so violently it knocked a pillow to the floor, took a large pistol from his pocket and slammed it on the dresser. After washing up, “he came rushing downstairs as if his life depended on it,” and when Eliot asked, “Now, are you taking breakfast with me?” replied, “Oh no, I promised Bishop Lawrence I would take breakfast with him—and good gracious!”—clapping his right hand to his side—“I’ve forgotten my gun!” Retrieving it, the President of the United States rushed off to see the Bishop while the president of Harvard, horrified by violation of a Massachusetts law against carrying pistols, muttered, “Very lawless; a very lawless mind.”
The pistol represented, perhaps, less a lawless mind than the creed of the time that life was a fight. No one felt it more deeply than Roosevelt.

Excerpt From
The Proud Tower
Barbara W. Tuchman

If your predecessor got shot......McKinley.....maybe you would carry a gun everywhere too.

also one of the few northern cities to have segregation laws