The Warp, Woof, and Weave of This Story's Tapestry Would Foster the Illusion of Further Progress: Justified and the Evolution of Western Violence

The Western's conception of justifiable gun violence has always been historically contingent and interrelated to variations in the American legal system. This essay draws the disparate threads of a legal discourse and a cultural tradition together to fashion the interwoven cloth of a social, juridical, and political acceptance of personal gun violence that is still expanding today. The first part traces the development of the American self-defense law, which was markedly transformed from its English heritage into a far-reaching doctrine of legally justifiable homicide. The second part is an examination of a recent Western, the FX series Justified. While Justified trades on standard Western conventions—the white-hatted hero, the marshal service, the legitimate use of gun violence—the show is noteworthy for the ways it explicitly interrogates the rhetoric of selfdefense. This essay argues that despite illusory progress—like Justified's exploration of the complex rhetorical strategies that allow gun violence to be "justified," Givens's anachronistic fit within modern law enforcement, or Ava Crowder's justified shooting of her husband—the show still ends up championing the resolution of conflicts at the end of a gun. This show's tapestry, then, is inherently conservative, deeply continuous of the traditional, triumphalist Western's glorification of private gun violence and resonant with a paradigmatic shift in the popular understanding of justifiable gun violence concomitant with the landmark Supreme Court case D.C. v. Heller (2008). Justified, like innumerable Westerns before it, works in the world as a negotiation between American legal and cultural discourses.