Were guns completely without control then?
Apart from the overtly racist gun control laws (people of color barred from possessing arms) in some places, there were no "gun control laws", murder was murder regardless of the tool, assault was assault, robbery was robbery, etc. Prior, all gun control laws were designed to protect KKK members from their intended victims. This is what we are talking about, when Constitutional loyalists talk about the racist roots of gun control. It is history, not opinion.
Did ten year old kids then have no parents?
Contrary, they had parents who taught them responsibility early on, and it wasn't uncommon for children to bring their gun to school so they could bag dinner on the way home.
Did they have unlimited funds to order things through the mail?
Unlimited might be a stretch. There were railroad tycoons and other such industrial super-rich & they had children. . . I think the point was there was no law against it (a child mail ordering a maxim)
I'd say there were controls back then, at least enough to prevent these rich, unsupervised ten year olds from mowing down first graders.
Yuppers, murder was still illegal back then . . . but the controls were social rather than legal. The only gun control laws in that era were based on skin color. Then, democrats allowing people of color to vote was a hot topic back then too. The painfully slow progress (toward equal rights for people of color) was coupled with the rise in KKK memberships all the way into the 1920's. Gun control is Jim Crow's last stand.
-- A2SG, then again, maybe those mass shootings didn't make the papers.....
While it would solidify Sarah Brady's case if there were, and there were even more, than now that we have gun free zones and more infringements on 2nd amendment rights . . . that simply isn't the case. I understand the inclination to revise history, but I don't have the stomach for it, too hard to learn from the past if we rewrite how it went.