Episode 04: Gunslinging Justice

For this episode, Ryan is joined by Justin A. Joyce, Research Director for President Dwight McBride at the New School in New York City, Managing Editor of the James Baldwin Review, and the author of Gunslinging Justice: The American Culture of Gun Violence in Westerns and the Law. The paperback edition of the book, originally published in 2018, is now available from Manchester University Press. Gunslinging Justice argues that Westerns work together with legal discourse to legitimate certain forms of gun violence, establishing norms for who is allowed to engage in this violence – and why – and thereby helping to construct Anglo masculinity. In telling this story, Joyce traces the evolution of American self-defense doctrine and the history of the U.S. Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment. He shows how this evolution is also visible in the evolution of the Western as a literary and film genre, and he explores how the distinctive “firearm iconography” associated with the rifle, the pistol, and the machine gun works in film classics like High Noon, Winchester ’73, Rio Bravo, The Wild Bunch, and many more. In its final few chapters, Gunslinging Justice brings this story into the present, tracing connections between more recent film and TV Westerns – including Unforgiven, Justified, and Django Unchained – and contemporary social developments like neoliberalism and the effort to rethink the concept of “self-defense” in cases of domestic violence.