THIS morning I read of the altercation in Montana that led a homeowner to shoot and kill a jealous husband. Brice Harper had a relationship with Dan Fredenberg's wife. The wife insisted it was only an "emotional" affair, but no mind: an angry, intoxicated and unarmed Fredenberg charged into Mr Harper's Montana garage, where Mr Harper shot him dead.
The Kalispell, Montana police are not charging Mr Harper with any crime. The reason is the "castle doctrine", newly added to Montana law. If someone has merely "reasonable belief" that he will be assaulted, even by an unarmed assailant, in his home, he may use deadly force in response. The traditional arguments quickly flow from both sides: from the police and gun-control advocates, that this is a "license to kill", from the pro-gun lobby, that it deters crime.
What struck me was not the usual arguments, but the word "castle" attached to the legal doctrine in question. As it happens, last night I was reading Steven Pinker's "Better Angels of Our Nature". As those who have heard of the book know, Mr Pinker argues that violence (both war and homicide, and assault to boot) have declined precipitously in almost all corners of the world. He sets out to explain why.
Critics of the book have completely failed, in my view, to rebut Mr Pinker's masses of evidence that violence has, in fact, declined. But his "why" is interesting, and controversial. In "The Pacification Process" (Chapter 2), Mr Pinker argues that the growth of modern states—Hobbes's "Leviathan"—allowed people to put violence in the hands of the sovereign and escape the "security trap" that made them feel that they had to fight on a hair-trigger to protect themselves from potential threats. (When everyone is on a hair-trigger, the whole society is violent.) As those sovereigns grew in reach, homicide declined dramatically. In "The Civilizing Process" (Chapter 3), he argues that this gradually led to an ethic of self-restraint in the societies lucky enough to have an effective sovereign. All manner of urges—to have sex, fight, spit, urinate, you name it—became things that "civilised" people (first in the upper classes, then gradually the middle and lower classes) were expected to control. As late as the mid-1800s, an English gentleman was expected to beat a boorish cabman or bargee for an affront we would now consider trivial.