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The paradigm of the armed and dangerous mass killer in public opinion and legislation is a homicidal-suicidal stranger hunting in public. Yet half of all firearms-related homicides take place in the home, typically among intimates and people known to the slain. Drawing on data from the National Violent Death Reporting System, this chapter shows that even in the context of extraordinary violence by the homicidal-suicidal, the major early red flags and risk factors involve seemingly ordinary smaller-scale assaults and domestic disturbances. Firearms laws prevent individuals convicted of crimes of domestic violence or under court-issued restraining orders from possessing firearms. The problem is that many perpetrators never come to the attention of a court. Based on these findings regarding what current legal screens miss, this chapter discusses how police discretion and scene-of the-assault procedure for “ordinary” domestic violence can help prevent escalation to the feared extraordinary violence of homicidal-suicidal mass killings.

This chapter frames the discussion of the politics of firearms with an exploration of the gendered nature of domestic violence, firearm fatalities, and the firearms debate, including how women are portrayed and the gender identities of the most prominent voices for “gun rights” and gun control. Given the stark and brutal realities of firearms and family violence, politicians across the ideological spectrum should readily agree that people who violently attack or threaten family members should be subject to practical and measured restrictions on their access to firearms. Unfortunately, safety as related to firearms and family violence has become highly politicized. This chapter identifies measure that states can enact to address the loopholes that allow domestic abusers to acquire firearms even after they have been convicted of felony abuse, often to deadly effect.

This chapter traces the changing iconography of guns within an array of literary texts from the nineteenth century and cinematic texts of the twentieth century. This chapter outlines the shifting emphases within the Western; for though the gun has always been important to the Western, the genre’s representations of gun violence have varied through its history. This chapter argues that the Western's changing iconographic emphases, from aim to speed, codes violence morally upright and justifiable at different moments within the genre’s long history.

This concluding chapter examines the relationship between the increasing codification of aggressive “Stand Your Ground” laws since 2005 and the continued relevance of the Western as a popular genre. This final chapter presents a reading of two contemporary Westerns, the television series Justified (2010-15) and Quentin Tarrantino's film, Django Unchained (2012), arguing that the film epitomizes the challenge of gun possession and self-defense within a neoliberal state.

Mass incarceration exists in America on a scale unmatched in global history. America is also the only Western democracy that has not abolished the death penalty; and one of the nations that execute the most prisoners alongside abusive dictatorships like China, North Korea, and Iran. American justice is further characterized by pervasive racial discrimination, the peculiar “War on Drugs,” the dehumanizing treatment of juveniles, and routine use of harmful solitary confinement. Modern America has thus become a systematic human rights violator in criminal law and punishment. It was not always so, as foreigners once saw American justice as enlightened. Harsh justice has not made America particularly safe. It has the highest murder rate and the most gun violence in the West due to extraordinarily lax gun control shaped by die-hard partisans of the Second Amendment and lobbying by the NRA. Criminal justice reform gained more attention after shootings of unarmed black men in Ferguson and beyond led to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. However, historical root causes behind this dimension of American exceptionalism have been widely overlooked, including systemic racism, populism, anti-intellectualism, market fundamentalism, and religious fundamentalism.

This chapter presents a reading of Unforgiven (1992), situating this film within a paradigmatic shift in the extension of due process protections for minorities, and the transformation of American self-defense doctrine brought about through a focus on battered women.