Gunslinging justice: Justifiable gun violence in American law and Westerns

Gunslinging Justice examines representations of gun violence in Western films and literature alongside changes in justifiable homicide and gun rights in the United States. The genre's climactic gun violence has been read as a symbolic opposition between the ideals of "the law" embodied in the 'civilized' American legal system and a putatively more 'savage' justice which resorts to gun violence to resolve disputes. I argue, in fact, that this opposition between "the law" and extralegal gun violence is progressively undone in the genre's formulaic shootouts.;While these shootouts may look like a 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. American jurisprudence transformed the English common law obligation to retreat "to the wall" into a far-reaching doctrine of legally justifiable homicide that advocates standing one's ground in self-defense. Viewed in this light, the climactic gun violence of a seminal Western text like Wister's 1902 novel, The Virginian, or the classic 1952 film High Noon, seeks not to oppose "the law," but rather to expand its scope.;My approach to the Western is unique because my research traces the genre in both its literary and cinematic forms and relates the genre's changing representational and iconographic tropes to paradigmatic shifts in the American legal system. My interdisciplinary approach, which seeks to historicize and contextualize the iconographic tropes of the genre 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), my work 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.