Reply #54: Actually, Roe, I don't want to ban guns [View All]

[Lydia Leftcoast]

Many of my relatives are hunters.

I was commenting on the sorry state of anyone who has let sensationalized TV reporting (and it is deliberately sensationalized, or didn't you know that?) and cop video shows influence his view of reality.

The fear-mongering is intended to make us mistrust our fellow human beings, especially those who are different from us. It is intended to make us hole up in our fortified houses instead of getting out and interacting with our neighbors and reclaiming our streets simply by force of numbers.

Japan has an extremely low crime rate (rising because of economic problems, but still enviably low by anyone's standards), and having lived there, I attribute it to the fact that even big-city neighborhoods are really urban villages, with all the necessities of life located nearby and the possibility of interacting with the same people day after day. People walk a lot more than they do here, and at all hours. The "good" people literally outnumber the criminals on the street in all but the neighborhoods that have been tacitly set aside for the yakuza to control.

Two major factors behind the high U.S. crime rate are 1) economic inequality and no one really doing anything about except to apply band-aids that make the underclass even more resentful, and 2) the lack of real old-fashioned communities.