I hate to admit it, but I learned some moral lessons from the TV Westerns I watched as a kid. For example, I learned that a lawman was a coward if he shot another man in the back, even if the man he shot was a gunslinger or a horse thief. If the man he shot was unarmed, then the lawman was yellow-bellied.
I never saw a show in which a lawman shot an unarmed boy in the back when the boy tried to flee. Back then, the existence of such a beastly lawman was just too horribly despicable to imagine.
My, how times have changed.
Kurt Colborn
Swisshelm Park