History
Punishments and torture have varied through history and culture. The earliest punishments were in public places to scare and model the consequences of breaking the law"("Bilboes, Brands, and Branks"). In some cultures the only law of the land was "eye for an eye", what ever was done to the victim, them they had the pass to break the law and do equal damage to the offender. This was not always regulated by law and some cases had no justifiable causes for getting revenge. If they were regulated they were regulated mainly by the church.
"The churches had a three strike rule in which you had three misdemeanors before put to death. If those three strikes were surpassed you would be hung in the gallows for others to see"("Bilboes, Brands, and Branks"). The gallows were set up to send offenders to and scare the second offenders.
Vigilantes have lived throughout times causing trouble for the government and taking causes into their own hands.The article states roughly what was happening before vigilantes, “It began, the story goes, in California in 1851, when outlawry was in wild and bloody flower and when every adventurer could buy a woman for the asking plus a sack of gold. Naturally, the better elements of the community wouldn't stand for it, and so they started a vigilante movement for law and order”(Stolberg).
These people are naive to the fact that problems are caused by their actions and are not actually in the best interests of the people. Their actions reflect their point of view of the world, they were the prosecutor, judge and executioner it was a job they took upon themselves illegally. Courageous and clouded people started hunting criminals without reason to rid them of the world. The article describes Vigilantes, “The last decade, especially, we have had a veritable plague of new moronic, inverted-populist movements—infantile, illiterate, confused, and vicious”(Stohlberg). Judgement was not defined so, little things could be more dangerous than the things that are a little more important today. In reality vigilantes were the criminals who proclaimed themselves the law.