Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
But gun ownership is not necessarily linked to rampant crime, Elfwreck. Eg, Switzerland, a country with one of the lowest crime rates in the world, requires every man of military age to keep an assault rifle at home. Switzerland doesn't have the routine "mass killings" that the US unfortunately seems subject to. Why? I don't know.
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I suspect some of it (a lot of it) is that the US doesn't have a unified culture--we have so much damn space, and so many people, that we have a constant set of problems where how the laws actually work in one area (as opposed to how they're written; there's always some difference) is different from other areas... and where people from two different subcultures meet, and find they aren't operating on the same assumptions about laws and ethics and cultural standards, they opt for "no rules" on the grounds that "the other guy isn't following the rules."
I don't know what kind of solutions are possible, but I suspect that no amount of "top-down" rules are going to work--drafting new legislation on a national level won't help Oakland's crime rate a bit, because national legislation won't deal with the causes of crime here. (And if it does, it won't be dealing with the causes of crime in Pheonix, Arizona, nor in New York.)