Routledge Handbook of American Violence

During the early years of the twenty-first century in the United States, the status of a long series of high-profile killings as self-defensive was publicly contested with collective fury, anguish, and sorrow. Such contestations raise conceptual questions about self-defensive and vigilante violence. How this conceptual boundary is drawn can carry grave social consequences. But why do these two categories so easily form a space of high-stakes contestation? I offer an analysis of vigilantism that clarifies its relationships with self-defense, shows how they can overlap, what makes them different, and why they are so easily contested.