True. Here in Knoxville, we’ve been slow to come around to the “rebuilt inner city” concept. It’s still pretty dead down there. BUT, you don’t get mugged or shot either. I feel perfectly safe walking around downtown Knoxville alone at any time of day or night.
Because foreign agents promise us to do fantastic spreadsheets of our favorite stuff and then disappear with priveledged info…
[quote]
Anyway, should England want a rematch after the RW,
[quote]
War of 1812.
The UK lost.
::sigh::
EvilBeth, I am a farm kid. I think maybe that gives me the right to make stupid, insipid, pointless, and unfunny cracks about ‘my own’.
Daniel, you don’t have to regret that I’m on to something. I really can hold an intelligent discourse when I’m pressed. If you want, I can send you some of my work on the Odyssey. Not like you’d care, though.
–Tim
We are the children of the Eighties. We are not the first “lost generation” nor today’s lost generation; in fact, we think we know just where we stand - or are discovering it as we speak.
And who destroys Wembley Stadium every year? Sheesh!
“Teaching without words and work without doing are understood by very few.”
-Tao Te Ching
Okay, so you’re an incestuous troll.
Born O.K. the first time…
If you are born again, do you have two belly buttons?
Interesting this subject came up. While over in England we got to spend a very informative evening with a local Police Sergeant in Colchester, a larger berg. Here are some things we learned:
-
In the down town area there are CCTV’s
( closed circuit tv’s) everywhere. No one there complains about them because crime has dropped. I can’t imagine this ever getting passed the ACLU without a hell of a fight. -
The cops do not carry guns and there is one special unit, usually one guy per district/city ( like the dog catcher) who is in charge of a weapons situation should it arise.
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Cops do no wear sunglasses. Eye contact is very important in making a personal connection with whomever you are speaking with.
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Most deaths over in that area are drug addicts bashing in other drug addicts and the usual DWI stuff.
-
The cops do no carry badges like we all know them, they carry ID and an imprint of their crest on an offical looking wallet. ( I thought that was interesting.) And there is braille on the back of the official photo ID, which we joked read, " You are fucked" for a local blind person to read.
The brits I met with seemed to think that we are an unusually violent country and I think most of it is do to the constant barrage of doom from the media. It is really rare we hear anything about Europe unless it is a colassal tragedy ( mad cow, train wreck, hooligans…)
The french are known for their horrid treatment of criminals (I’m basing this on a book I read called " Catch me if you can"( Can’t remember the guy’s name, sorry. Great book, BTW) a American con man that gets busted in France and is put into a very tiny cell that has no heat, he cannot stand up or lay down completely and he is naked all the time. His bath was a bucket of cold water thrown at him once in a week. The French want/wanted to send a message that they don’t tolerate law breakers in their area. I don’t know if they are still as strict. The book was printed in the mid-80’s.
There is no happy solution anywhere, it seems.
The early bird gets the worm but it’s the second mouse that gets the cheese.
I’ve read that the crime rate in all the major crime categories in the U.S. is now just about the same as in Western Europe - with one exception: murder. Murder is more common in the U.S. because it’s easier to get hold of a gun.
Incidentally, it’s not true that owning guns is an American tradition that goes back to the Revolutionary War. Recent research seems to indicate that around 1800 only about 15% of families owned a gun, and half of those weren’t in working order. People did not often hunt with guns for a major part of their food (although sometimes they trapped for it). It would have been too hard, since guns weren’t consistently accurate enough then. Gun ownership didn’t start to rise until after the Civil War, when many of the soldiers illegally kept their guns.
The impression of common ornership of guns in the Wild West is just mythology too. Many towns had gun control. There were no quick-draw sharpshooters either back then. Guns weren’t accurate enough for that.
Do you have any sources for that data, Wendell? I’d be interested in taking a look at 'em.
“Some people are worried about the difference between right and wrong. I’m worried about the difference between wrong and fun.”
~P.J. O’Rourke~
For the data in the second paragraph, look in A Necessary Evil by Garry Wills, particularly chapters 1 (Minutemen) and 19 (Individuals: Frontier).
For the data in the first paragraph, it’ll take me some time to find it. I’ll see what I can do. Does anyone else have that information that they can get to quickly?
I’ll state it very simply; America is by far not the most violent country in the world. England has more violence in it than one might think and France is no picnic and I don’t even want to try to explain many of the Middle Eastern countries. Drop in on Mexico, which has about the most corrupt police force in the world, and take a walk alone in the middle of the night, especially in Mexico City. You might survive if you are quick and real tough.
[Women in my univ class went to Ireland and thumbed their way around 90% of the time. They couldn’t do that here, wouldn’t think of it.]
Huh… Sure, we’ve got some bad neighborhoods in our big cities (and not so big cities), but they’re easy to avoid for the most part. In the UK, terrorist bombs and gunfire can (and do) break out anytime (all the time), anywhere.
As much as I’d love to see Ireland, or even London, I doubt I’ll ever go. Knowing that simply walking down a busy street or getting on a bus in the UK (no matter WHAT neighborhood I’m in) could very well result in my being blown to bits by some whacked-out IRA terrorist bomber keeps me at home, riding my own non-exploding buses, walking along streets where car bombs don’t go off indiscriminately.
But that’s just my personal preference.
StoryTyler
I am too in shape! :::muttering::: Round is a shape.
I’ve read everyones posts, and I think it’s more than the sum of the whole. “huh?” you say?
OK, take history, take geography, take government, take laws and you still only have a small picture of what makes nationalities do what they do. For all these reasons and a heck of a lot more we are just different. Changing this law or that, making people aware, or marching to Capitol Hill is not going to change our views to anything like the English.
About a week back, this Brit dude [now a US alien] did not like what I said to him and decided to back slap me across the face, leaving just a little mark later. I of course, asked the cops to call him & ask him to ‘not hit me anymore.’[twice he has]. This cop call seemed to scare the shit out of him.
Later he said to my friend, when asked why he hit me, ‘because that’s how we handle things in England.’
Really???
Hate to bring this up, but, since Coldfire brought up the Netherlands…
http://news.excite.com/news/r/991207/13/news-dutch-shooting
Four Wounded In First Dutch School Shooting
Anyway, it’s looking like the US doesn’t have a monopoly on violence, or even gun violence.
I just KNEW someone must have seen that too.
Quite shocking, since it never happened before in this country - and what incredible timing too…
From what I’ve seen the 5 people injured are going to live. The shooter has turned himself in.
A bit of cultural background: the shooter was a 17 year old boy with a Turkish ethnicity. People had been gossiping about his sister being somewhat of a slut-of-the-school. The people he shot were mainly guys that had alledgedly kissed or fondled his sister.
Talking to a Turk about his sister is like talking about a black mans mother… a sensitive topic. That’s what set him off, probably. Hell, we can’t blame THIS one on Christianity 
Coldfire
“You know how complex women are”
- Neil Peart, Rush (1993)
Silliest post of the year, we have a winner.
Your chances of being killed by a terrorist bomb in either the UK or Ireland are miniscule, far lower than your chances of being killed in most American cities, and this was true even before the cease-fire.
On a personal note, I lived in England during an active IRA campaign, and travelled to NI during a particularly tense time, and I still felt safer walking the streets there than I do in most US cities.
MaxTorque:
Former PM of England Benjamin Disraeli once said “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” But, since you brought up the statistics,…
First of all, I looked at both of your links. I am concerned that one has US statistics from 1997, the other from 1993, AND THEY MATCH. I doubt that we as a people are that consistant. Granted, it is probably a typeo; they updated a table and didn’t update one cell. However, that little discrepincy brings into doubt some of the other statistics listed, and whether or not all of them have been updated. Are these the most recent ones available, or are they conveniantly the ones that fit the arguement?
Second, you said that the US’ 6.8 homicide rate, which is about 5 times the UK’s homicide rate, is in proportion to their populaitons, and you are correct. However, those rates are per 100,000 of population, meaning the US has 5 X 5 or 25 times as many murders as England, which is 5 times out of proportion of their populations. The average individual in the US (according to these figures) has a 0.0068% chance of being murdered; in the UK, 0.0014%.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a gun control nut; I’m a statistical nut. If you’re going to use statistics, use them correctly.
“The large print givith, and the small print taketh away.”
Tom Waites, “Step Right Up”
Its probably the same in both US & England. But England doesn’t rate certain things as violent occurences that the US does.
Also, despite what the news says, school violence in the US is actually down about 40% from ten years ago.
handy:
???
I think we’d notice murder, which is what the statistics were for…