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Unforgiven couragously gives us a glimpse of an old West where the people were real and acted and reacted (like The Schofield Kid crying after killing a man) in a way not far from any of us today.
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I think that scene was representative of the theme of this film, which was a Western with transplanted '90s values. A town in 1880s Wyoming banning handguns as a solution to gun violence? Not very likely!
The "crying" scene was yet another instance of the filmmakers attempting to impose European bourgeois values on a culture and era where raw courage and casual violence were still considered normal, respectable behavior in many quarters. The culturally imposed revulsion of violence that had been achieved in the U.K. and other long-established European societies had taken 700+ years of civilizing, and the American frontier, where the law came after, not before, the settlers, would not reach that stage until some years afterwards.
Unforgiven may be a first in that it plays down the violence of one brutal era as much as
The Untouchables overplayed that of another.
RD