If you could be transported to an alternate world in which everything was the same except that there was much less guarantee by central authorities of safety, in exchange for correspondingly less central restriction/oversight, would you? Would you prefer there to be no searches on passengers boarding airplanes? Would you be willing to live in a much more crime ridden or violent area if you had carte blanche to shoot anyone who robbed or assaulted you?
I voted for more freedom, but I’m in the U.K., where we’re less free than the U.S. anyway.
I’d be interested to see how the results break down by sex - I’ve long been told that women are readier to trade freedom for safety but do not know if it’s true.
Qualified answer - I somewhat agree with Lazarus Long that an armed society can be a very polite society [provided dueling is legal] and I normally joke that they should just give everybody on the airplane a stun gun and not bother searching people other than putting them through an explosives detector … and let them duke it out if any terrorists tried to take over the plane [look how well that one planeload did with no particular weapons and think what would have happened if they had a few stun guns. of course I would seal the cockpit crew in with their own bathroom and food so the rest of the plane has no access to them during flight]
I have actually lived in a slum, complete with random gunfire [we had bikers sort of kitty cornered across from the place that dealt drugs, and liked to shoot out the transformers. I did have a gun and I would have shot anybody breaking in, and since I was working as an armed guard at the time, I tended to go to and from work openly armed so I rarely got bothered. The one time some idiots followed me home the block from the beach and started pounding on my door I did actually answer the door armed and menaced them into leaving me alone. Not sure what the actual murder rate of Ocean View was, but there was a murder in the small 8 flat apartment building that my tiny duplex backed up to while I was living there [sailor decided to off his GF and stashed the body in the bathtub for a month … he kept using other peoples bathrooms using the excuse that his was broken. I suppose it is sort of indicative of the place that nobody thought the stench was anything but the unrepaired broken bathroom …] so obviously the idea of less safety doesn’t bother me. Of course I do have more belongings now, but since I am mostly housebound, there would be someone home [rather like living in Naples or Sardinia or many third world areas where if you leave a house without someone there it will get burglared]
Since I am generally within arms reach of various weapons when I am at home now, and will shoot first as I have no expectations of escape [gimp, cant run, and cant jump out of a window] the only difference is being able to do it without worrying about dealing with the police. Although mrAru’s policy is that he would rather make bail than ID my body at the morgue.
Well, there’s plenty of freedom to go around in several places on this world already - just check the list for failed states.