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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.
List of contents
Introduction: the warp, woof, and weave of American gun violence
1 'A kind of wild justice': revenge and constitutional commentary in the Western
2 No retreat: American self-defense doctrine
3 American gun rights: from national defense to self-defense
4 The guns that 'won the Western': firearm iconography in western literature and film
5 Guns and governmentality: normative masculinity and disciplined gun violence
6 Deserve's got [everything] to do with it: property, process, and justice in
Unforgiven7 Old dogs and new tricks: race and justifiable homicide in neoliberalism's Western imagination
Index
About the author
Justin A. Joyce is Research Director for President McBride at The New School and Managing Editor of the
James Baldwin Review
Summary
Gunslinging justice examines gun violence in Western films and literature alongside changes in justifiable homicide and gun rights in the United States. -- .
