No Duty to Retreat

Download or read book No Duty to Retreat written by Richard Maxwell Brown and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1865, Wild Bill Hickok killed Dave Tutt in a Missouri public square in the West’s first notable "walkdown." One hundred and twenty-nine years later, Bernard Goetz shot four threatening young men in a New York subway car. Apart from gunfire, what do the two events have in common? Goetz, writes Richard Maxwell Brown, was acquitted of wrongdoing in the spirit of a uniquely American view of self-defense, a view forged in frontier gunfights like Hickok’s. When faced with a deadly threat, we have the right to stand our ground and fight. We have no duty to retreat.