The Return Of The Gunslinger, by NC Scout

The term Gunslinger. It conjures a mythos, surrounded by Western lore rooted deep in the American psyche. Reflective of a uniquely American trait of celebrating the anti-hero, no image of the American West can be envisioned absent the dusty, leather-clad horseman clutching big iron. But that image comes from a unique time of transition in America struggling to move on from the destruction of the Civil War, pushing westward in a race to capture the resources necessary to cement its place as a rival power to the European nations, culminating with the Presidency of Teddy Roosevelt. Indeed the American Gunslinger is part and parcel of that era and for good reason. Justice.

Contemporary America once more finds itself in a looming state of crisis. Under duplicitous terms such as ‘criminal justice reform’, Americans are facing a rapidly growing problem with criminality that can no longer be ignored. What was once a rare occasion, something that simply happened to other people and played on the 11 ‘o clock news is now commonplace; an intermingling of economic and drug issues, sure. But a heavy dose of social, as well. We can no longer call a spade a spade. Crimes and criminality in America are in large part a result of this reality brought on by decades of ‘political correct’ thought control. Bail is racist. Labeling crimes as such is racist. Proven crime prevention means based around deterrence, such as hot spot policing, have been discarded at the behest of so-called citizen review boards that are little more than a handful of public-face legitimized criminals determining which parts of the cities they’ll claim as their own. City councils, dominated by Leftists, install hopelessly ineffectual and corrupt Chiefs of Police and county Sheriffs that are little more than politicians in uniform. Now silent are the calls to defund the police on the Left – they simply wanted it remade in their own image. Despite the exorbitant spending on police domestically in the US, we are told by our courts that there is no Constitutional duty to protect its citizenry.

“Neither the Constitution, nor state law, impose a general duty upon police officers or other governmental officials to protect individual persons from harm — even when they know the harm will occur,” said Darren L. Hutchinson, a professor and associate dean at the University of Florida School of Law. “Police can watch someone attack you, refuse to intervene and not violate the Constitution.”

The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the government has only a duty to protect persons who are “in custody,” he pointed out.

If there is no justice to be had and no duty to protect its citizenry, then what is the role of any so-called Law Enforcement? If there is no duty to protect, coupled with an increasing loss of faith in the objectivity of the justice system, a populace quickly begins to view such an entity first as an annoyance and then with outright contempt.

Crime rates are on parallel to mirror the most violent periods in American history at the aggregate level – the 1880s, the 1980s – and unlike the the later, there is no economic or political solution in sight. What of the business owners having lost their entire life’s work to marauding thugs, looting and burning, unabated? What of the fathers, having lost sons and daughters to wanton violence, only to be told that they’ll not only be no justice but that the offenders require ‘social rehabilitation’? What of the victims themselves? The term the Left uses is ‘restorative justice’, a type of model that views crime as the criminal being victim, acting out as a function of social frustration rather than raw evil. The toxicity of such a notion is poisoning the very fabric of this country in a possibly irredeemable way, damaging any positive perception the public may have had in a once stable justice system. So be it.

This returns us to the era of the gunslinger. Despite the image of the lone cowboy, squaring off in a duel, the reality was far more bloody and violent than Hollywood envisioned trope. The nation of 1880 was still reeling from a war that was certainly not over in the minds of many. While the guns of northern Virginia had fallen silent, they were still very much alive in the push westward, where now out of work soldiers from both sides found themselves doing the things they knew best. Law and legality were very much arbitrary terms then as it were today. Dissatisfied with a justice system not equipped to handle the necessity of swift trials and punishments, much of the era of the gunslinger was reflective of the realities of frontier justice. You did it, we know you did it, and we don’t need to wait on formalities. And while such a perception is hideously toxic to any functional social structure, it was as much a necessity at that phase of America as it may very well be in the near future.

Gunslingers, as hired guns, were paid either by those with vested interest in a place or by the towns themselves, formalized with positions of dubious however necessary authority and labeled Marshals. They were hired killers brought in to restore order, nothing more, nothing less, once conditions in a place reached a fever pitch. Even more common was the execution of blood feuds brought on by a transgression the law itself fails to reparate. Such is the situation we find ourselves in today. It is a common theme in much of the world, still very much alive from the tribal systems of the Pashtun to the quiet seething of victims domestically here at home. The political system, corrupted by the communist Left, seems apparently disinterested in restoring any of its now-lost faith, rather seeking to punish political enemies while enabling criminals to continue, unabated. It won’t last, it can’t last.

The era of the Gunslinger will return.