Quote:
Originally Posted by DWB
Great post.  |
Yeah, but all afternoon, while I was out of the house, I kept thinking that I'd left three important things out of my answer.
1. Drugs. A very large number of people here in the US have self-medicated themselves, usually for anxiety or depression with addictive narcotic drugs and are hooked - American law is simply death on drugs - possession of any quantity of anything but weed is a felony in my state, possession, not dealing. As a result, drug prices are hugely inflated - and the physical and psychological need to acquire them at any price hugely fuels much of street crime, shoplifting, prostitution, you name it. If they sold for the price of the common, uncomplicated, generic drugs, that they are, in drugstores, a huge amount of crime, including much violent crime would disappear - and along with it, the danger that gun owners want to protect against. Nobody ever tallies this up in the price of the war on drugs, but along with erosion of our civil liberties, it is part of that price. Turf wars for the sale of illegal drugs generate most of the homicides in Chicago, innocent kids get killed, and the climate of violence increases. (I didn't want you to think that all the violence comes from racial strife because that's not true. A big part of the danger we feel about becoming crime victims emerges from those do-gooders who want to transform men into angels by abolishing drug use through legislation. It doesn't work, and our personal safety is victim to the well-meaning spirit behind drug laws. Desperate criminals of all races are created by these laws.)
2. In our urban centers, the schools pretend that guns don't exist. Despite the fact that a nearly irresistible allure for them is created by movies, TV, and music. Nobody outside the farm counties and states ever learns about them and skills and acquires a healthy respect for them unless they join the military. Nobody outside those places ever gets trained in marksmanship till some of them join the service. Another reason why so many innocent people here, noncombatants in the turf wars, get killed, including little kids asleep in the living room hit by stray gunfire. It happens regularly in Chicago.
3. Finally, distinguishing the US situation from that in other countries, frankly, our national graphic equalizer is set in the direction of distrust and disrespect for authority, while those in Europe are set in the other direction. Both extremes have problems. These attitudes set Europe up for fascism; the opposite attitudes create a climate of anarchy. Mistrust of authority and a heightened sense of individualism are at the core of our values; our constitutional form pits one branch of government against another, believing that none of them can be trusted, in the hope that this will distract all of them from oppressing us; the whole concept of the Bill of Rights is that government just can't be trusted not to become a tyranny without unchanging landmarks of individual rights. We write the word "Liberty" on every coin. Every American educated here, and every naturalized citizen, learns that it was an armed citizen uprising against a lawful but tyrannical government that set us up as a nation. We were settled by the outcasts of other nations, nonconformists who could not fit in and needed more breathing room. All of this adds up to a people who are hard to govern, hard to control, defiant, independent-minded, and maybe just a bit less polite about resolving disputes. Just my kind of people.