Hmmm… there seems to be an elephant sitting in the living room that no one wishes to acknowledge.
Yes, Switzerland does have a different culture, and it ain’t due to a “huge amount of mandatory training”. Switzerland is “uni-cultural”, unlike the United States, Canada and Britain that have found it contemporary fashionable to become “multi-cultural”.
Forget the “more guns = less crime” or “more guns = more crime” arguments, let’s address the “elephant”.
More “multiculturalism” = more crime.
As the government of Great Britain has implemented a more “multi-cultural” immigration policy, a coinciding increase in crime has resulted. What, for the government to do? Well, the government is certainly not going to alter its policy. No, that might admit some culpability. What the government does is ban the ownership of firearms for everyone. Yeah, that’s the solution. Too bad the crime rate doesn’t drop, but at least the government has banned firearms and made potential criminals of previously law-abiding citizens. (Surely it wouldn’t be planned that way? Nah, “Big Brother” really does love you.)
The same thing has occurred here in the United States. As the immigration policy has become more “multi-cultural”, the crime rate has, coincidently, increased. Examining the crime rates of states with a large “multi-cultural” population, and comparing them to states with small “multi-cultural” populations easily prove this.
But nooooo… you can’t do that. Why that would be just as “wrong” as applying a higher degree of scrutiny to Arabs boarding an airliner, than the typical American grandmother.
You have to look at places or states with very very low crime, such as North Dakota and Vermont, then look at places with high crime, such as Washington DC, and then see what factors are different in the two places.
What factors in these places have postive correlations with crime?
After you find a few factors which test postively for crime, then expand it to more places/states.
If possible, you may want to change Washington DC to have as the same characteristics that Vermont has, e.g. change Washington DC gun laws to be the same as Vermonts gun laws.availability, whatever they may be, etc.
Ah, this explains why Canada, with double the percentage of immigrants as a portion of the total population as compared to the US and less emphasis on assimilation of said immigrants into the existing culture has a higher crime rate than the US. I’d been wondering about that, myself. :rolleyes:
The whole gun control debate would benefit enormously if people on both sides of the fence refrained from making so damned many ridiculous overgeneralizations.
Right. Because it’s the gun laws that are the main difference between ND/VT and DC. Or maybe it’s the fact that no one lives there. DC has over 550,000 people living in 61 square miles. Vermont has 9,600 square miles with only about 610,000. So we have only about 60,000 more people spaced out over an extra 9,500 square miles.
So yeah, I’m willing to bet if we decreased DC’s population density down to VT or ND levels, it would help alleviate crime a lot more than silly gun laws, or lack thereof. Hell, look at Texas with it’s liberal (in the classic sense) gun laws. It’s big cities still have some of the highest crime rates in the country. San Francisco has some of the lowest of major population centers.
Gun laws don’t make a difference either way. And it’s ignorant to claim they do.
While that possibly could be a single factor among many, the fact that crime rates steadily went down during the '90s, as the economy improved, proves your “truism” above as false. The state of the economy has a far greater impact on crime rates. If you look at this BJS spreadsheet from 2001, you’ll see that when comparing cities similar in size, the the less wealthy cities (in median household incomes) usually have higher crime rates.
It’s the heat. Heat is probably responsible for more violent deaths in the world than any other factor. We as a species just seem to get all mean and cranky when we’re hot.
The most violent places in the US aren’t New York, Chicago, or even Detroit. They are Atlanta, Houston, and Pheonix. Nothing to do with gun laws, or “Southern” culture. It’s all about the heat. This holds up outside of the US too. The Middle East? Hot. Africa? Hot. South America? Hot.
So, we shouldn’t ban guns, we should subsidize air conditioners. Or make all convicted felons move out to the under populated Great Plains states.
Yeah, its over-simplistic and probably wrong, but what “solution” isn’t?