Quotes from Richard Maxwell Brown

A man is not born to run away." Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1921).*

There was a logic behind the English cocoon-law requirement of a duty to retreat in a threatening situation: it was that the state-the Crown-wished to retain a monopoly of the resolution of conflict at the level of' dispute between individuals.

Should your opponent threaten you, you must not defend yourself with violence until you have attempted to get away-to flee from the scene altogether. If you are unable to leave the scene, you may not stuud your ground and kill in self-defense.

Following the Civil War, Americans began to perceive it new version of the earlier land-population-wealth crisis as an alarming trend of land consolidation and enclosure threatened the small landholders of the West. Henry George of San Francisco, later to be famous as the author of Progress and Poverty, articulated the new perception. George's social philosophy was moored in it deep belief in the homestead ethic.

The new surveillance is spearheaded by burgeoning, ever-more-sophisticated electronic means that include-among a staggering array of devices-potent lasers, parabolic microphones and other "bugs" with more powerful transmitters, subminiature tape recorders, improved remote camera and videotape systems, advanced ways of seeing in the dark, voice-stress analyzers, and powerful new tracking cfevices.o'h.

Indeed, the tendency of the Americain iiuud seems to he very strongly against the enforcement of any rule which requires a person to flee when assailed"-even to save human life'' In effect, Niblack held that the duty to retreat was a legal rationale for cowardice and that cowardice was simply un-American.

Kearney did not go as far in geographic distance as he did in mode of livelihood: although he only went across San Francisco Bay to Alameda County, he went much further in the change of his career, for this erstwhile drayman ended his days as a well-to-do commodity market speculator'4 -the very sort of thing he had so ardently attacked in speech after speech delivered to cheering working men in the sandlots of San Francisco.

Western Civil War of Incorporation

In late twentieth-century America, this "jurisprudence of lawlessness" is a bit out of (fate. While there is a vigorous victim-rights movement in our nation'' and increasingly strong compassion for the victims of rape,7 the day is long since past when rapists are routinely lynched as in Kernan's time. The killing of the seducer of a virgin is no longer it common occurrence, and unapologetic traducers of women stand in little danger of being shot.

A recent widely publicized case unites themes of no duty to retreat and, in individual terms, conquest and mastery. This was the case of the so-called "mountain man," Claude Dallas, who gained his livelihood in the i 97os and i9Hos by trapping animals in the wild, isolated country of desert and mountains where the three states of' Idaho, Oregon, and Nevada converge.

What might have developed into it great controversy in England over the duty to retreat failed to occur in the absence of conditions like those of America where it turbulent new society made the issue an important one.-

It is these conceptual categories of incorporatior gunji{~/iterc and resister gunfighters and not the mythical categories of' hero and villain that are the keys to unlocking the reality behind the myth of the American as gunfighter.