Gunslinging Justice : The American Culture of Gun Violence in Westerns and the Law

Gunslinging justice explores American Westerns in a variety of media alongside the historical development of the American legal system to argue that Western shootouts are less overtly “anti-law” than has been previously assumed. While the genre’s climactic shootouts may look like a putatively masculine opposition to the codified and mediated American legal system, this gun violence is actually enshrined in the development of American laws regulating self-defense and gun possession. The climactic gun violence and stylized revenge drama of seminal Western texts then, seeks not to oppose "the law," but rather to expand its scope. The book’s interdisciplinary approach, which seeks to historicize and contextualize the iconographic tropes of the genre and its associated discourses across varied cultural and social forms, breaks from psychoanalytic perspectives which have long dominated studies of film and legal discourse and occluded historical contingencies integral to the work cultural forms do in the world. From nineteenth century texts like Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Reconstruction era dime novels, through early twentieth century works like The Virginian, to classic Westerns and more recent films like Unforgiven (1992), this book looks to the intersections between American law and various media that have enabled a cultural, social, and political acceptance of defensive gun violence that is still with us today. Front matter 1 Dedication 6 Contents 8 Figures 9 Acknowledgements 12 Introduction: the warp, woof, and weave of American gun violence 14 ‘A kind of wild justice’: revenge and constitutional commentary in the Western 41 No retreat: American self-defense doctrine 61 American gun rights: from national defense to self-defense 82 The guns that ‘won the Western’: firearm iconography in Western literature and film 102 Guns and governmentality: normative masculinity and disciplined gun violence 141 ‘Deserve’s got [everything] to do with it’: property, process, and justice in Unforgiven 185 Old dogs and new tricks: race and justifiable homicide in neoliberalism’s Western imagination 209 Bibliography 240 Index 255 This title is a cultural history of the interplay between the Western genre and American gun rights and legal paradigms. From muskets in the hands of landed gentry opposing tyrannical government to hidden pistols kept to ward off potential attackers, the historical development of entwined legal and cultural discourses has sanctified the use of gun violence by private citizens and specified the conditions under which such violence may be legally justified. 'Gunslinging Justice' explores how the Western genre has imagined new justifications for gun violence which American law seems ever-eager to adopt This book is a cultural history of the interplay between the Western genre and American gun rights and legal paradigms. From muskets in the hands of landed gentry opposing tyrannical government to hidden pistols kept to ward off potential attackers, the historical development of entwined legal and cultural discourses has sanctified the use of gun violence by private citizens and specified the conditions under which such violence may be legally justified. Gunslinging justice explores how the Western genre has imagined new justifications for gun violence which American law seems ever-eager to adopt. Gunslinging Justice Examines Gun Violence In Western Films And Literature Alongside Changes In Justifiable Homicide And Gun Rights In The United States. Justin A. Joyce. Includes Bibliographical References (pages 227-241) And Index.