3. The Lawful West

Despite the popular image of the Wild West as a lawless place, frontier New Mexico was crawling with lawyers.  Writs, warrants and indictments tumbled across the landscape.  The Anglo-American legal system, like the tumblewood, was a non-native species that proliferated wildly.  My book Such Men as Billy the Kid, like Judging Crimes, is concerned with crime, violence and the law -- with society's response when its most vulnerable members are victimized.

The violence of the Wild West wasn't some isolated phenomenon that just happened to coincide with the social Darwinism of the Gilded Age.  It was social Darwinism, the survival of the "fittest" -- the most ruthless and the least scrupulous.  

Today's violence is not fundamentally different.  Americans of the 21st century tolerate vastly more violence against their fellow citizens than do the inhabitants of any other developed nation.  What makes this politically acceptable is that victims of criminal violence are disproportionately the poor, members of minority groups, the physically disabled, the mentally ill, children and the elderly.  After all, who is less "fit" than a still-warm corpse? 

Protection from violence is something the well-off can buy, with their burglar alarms, private transportation, gated communities, security guards, concealed hangun permits, nanny-cams, and all the rest. Those who don't take these self-protective measures have only themselves to blame.

America's poor suffer violence for the same reason they suffer inadequate health care, and why so many mentally ill live in the streets: because Americans, as a society, haven't yet fully accepted the idea that the resources of government should be expended to benefit those most in need of them.