Nonetheless, he blew them all away in the end. Gary Cooper was a movie hero of the 40's and 50's whose face constantly reflected how he was feeling about the violence around him. We have a process of laws to achieve justice. We don't glorify vengeance. We don't glorify taking the law into our own hands.
Westerns are popular movies partly because frontier life was still pre-law.
Individualism was geographic, with one farmstead separated by miles from the next. Individual families preserved themselves through values nurtured and passed on from generation to generation. In the public spaces of the range roved vigilantes, gangs, gunslingers, creating fear and terror in certain quarters. Everybody had a gun of some sort to defend themselves from lawlessness. Now we have militias training to defend themselves, not against lawlessness, but against the enforcement of law by the government.