A discussion of crime, law and society in the USA, which demonstrates that surges in crime since the 1950s have coincided with the emergence of the post-industrial society. It examines the growing popularity of the concept that persons under physical attack have the right to defend themselves.

"Richard Maxwell Brown has been a leading scholar of American violence since the late 1960s, when the turmoil following the assassination of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy led a presidential commission to publish Brown's interpretation in Violence in America. Now, in the wake of the Persian Gulf War, Brown looks at line-drawing in the sand by the Reagan-Bush administrations, and also at contemporary urban shoot-outs in racial and drug-related warfare, and traces their roots in the western gunfight and frontier vigilantism."--Hugh Davis Graham, Holland N. McTyeire Professor of American History, Vanderbilt University "A fascinating and provocative book. Not only is it an authoritative and engrossing examination of violence on the American frontier and in American society at large, but in American jurisprudence as well. Brown, moreover, relates his history to the present, giving illuminating depth and continuity to one of the nation's most persistently severe problems. It will stimulate and inform scholar and layman alike."--Robert M. Utley, author of High Noon in Lincoln and Billy the Kid