According to
http://us.imdb.com/Trivia?0105695:
Quote:
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The script floated around Hollywood for nearly 20 years...
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...so I don't think it's really fair to say it's all about '90s values.
As far as I understood, Big Whiskey's ban on guns was only a ban on carrying, to prevent out-of-town bounty hunters from riding after the two cowboys. I do not recall the subject of ownership by locals ever being addressed.
I don't think you can really characterize The Kid as just being there to accomodate a modern anti-gun stance. He stood for a rejection of and disgust with violence and killing in general. The guns are just a part of the historical setting. They could have made this a gladiatior movie, and he would have felt the same way about swords.
As for the bourgie European values, as much as you see them reflected in The Kid, I see them rejected by other central characters:
-Eastwood's character is not just some working-class drifter. He is an alcoholic and killer reformed into a sedentary family man by his late wife, who I would guess was probably a religious woman. And despite his conversion and domestication, he inevitably sinks back into his old ways.
-Freeman may have lost the stomach for killing, but he has no problem committing the sin of adultery.
-Hackman tries to isolate himself from the madness of the town by building his own house in a peaceful location, but he turns out to be a poor carpenter. The only things he is good at involve violence. And in the company of Saul Rubinek's writer (given a French name, no less) he comes across as boorish.
-Rubinek's character wets himself when drawn upon early in the movie, and in the end, is unable to pull the trigger on Eastwood. Message? He can't hang.
-And lastly of course, there is English Bob, who prides himself on being as cultured as he is deadly. He turns out to be a coward, a liar and a weakling.
I think if anything, the subject of middle-class values is broached for the sole purpose of rejecting them as largely incompatable with that era.