Re: Public School was a waste of my time (Re: When even a Republican can see i
- From: jgd@xxxxxxxxx (John Dallman)
- Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2007 14:22 +0100 (BST)
In article <6q6jh3lu49n07o1mschmmqq3idkpdo718p@xxxxxxx>,
nimshubur@xxxxxxxxxxx (Doug Wickstrom) wrote:
"Keith F. Lynch"
No. Today, the main moderating effect on violent crime isn't fear
of jail, it's fear of armed victims. (That's why places where
governments don't allow potential victims to be armed have a much
higher violent crime rate.) That certainly wouldn't change in an
anarchy. Violent criminals would have life expectancies measured
in minutes.
The statistics show mixed results on armed populace/violent crime
rate. It goes either way.
For example, nearly every Iraqi household has at least one gun.
About half of USian households do. By your argument, the violent
crime rate in Iraq should be less than that of the United States.
Yet, nearly every Swiss household has at least one gun, and
Switzerland _does_ have a violent crime rate less than that of
the United States.
I think the correlation is more likely "nearly all Swiss believe
in being good citizens, most Americans do, and few Iraqis do."
I think it's more complicated than that, even. The UK is one of the
least armed societies in the world, but our violent crime rate is lower
than the USA's, although probably not as low as Switzerland's. Canada is
an interesting example: almost as high a rate of gun ownership as the
USA, far less gun crime, both per head of population.
Quite a bit of it seems to come from much less concrete things than gun
ownership rate, or even population density. It seems to come from
people's ideas of "the right thing to do", or the images they're trying
to live up to. For example, a lot of the UK's gun crime comes from
people who are, frankly, gangster wannabees, imitating images they see
and not quite aware of the differences between image and reality until
they suffer the sudden illumination that comes from seeing large
quantities of blood flowing. Inability to back down on grounds of
machismo has a lot to do with things getting that far.
--
John Dallman, jgd@xxxxxxxxx, HTML mail is treated as probable spam.
.
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