Violence as Deterrent

POSTED BY: AnthonyT
UPDATED: Saturday, October 4, 2025 00:35
VIEWED: 6613
PAGE 7 of 12

Quote:

---

Originally posted by AnthonyT:

Hello,

I think a lot of the reason that the Wild West is romanticized so much is because in some cases it really was a more polite society. Wild West movies always depict bloody violence, because they are action films after all. But the shooting violence of the real Wild West could be neatly catalogued in a tome or two. Barring warfare or revolution, this same thing could probably be said of Victorian England, or most western countries at the time. It was an age when people seemed to hold life in higher regard, and when people seemed to have more manners. (Though this is debatable depending on what sorts of things offend you.) There were probably great and horrible miscairrages of justice back then, too, but this doesn't stick in the popular memory (unless you are of Mexican, Chinese, or African American descent, in which case the stories of injustice are probably carried on in family tellings.)

---

That would be the romanticised view. In reality there were more Gun murders in Victorian London than there are now. There was more violence through out the west. Life was cheap, and politeness was often a shallow facade over the real uglyness of squalor and gang warfare. None of our respective social problems are new by any stretch.

NOTIFY: Y  | REPLY  | REPLY WITH QUOTE  | PERMALINK  | TOP  | HOME

Quote:

---

Guns aren't the answer. Taking guns away isn't the answer. Jailing all criminals, or letting them all go, isn't the answer. If the answer was simple we'd have figured it out by now. We're not dealing with 'good guys' and 'bad guys'. We're dealing with 300 million individuals who each have different things that set them off or calm them down. You got folks who will kill over a perceived insult, and others who wouldn't ever use force to save their lives. One size does not fit all.

---

Yes, but... There is some factor -or several factors- in the USA which drive more people to violence here than in any other industrialized nation. Our nearest neighbor, in terms of murder rate, is about half of ours, and the next nearest is about a fifth. So while we are all individuals, as individuals we are reacting to (a) common factor(s) which is ... while not "unique" to the USA... certainly here is greater degree than in other nations of similar development and ethos.

ONE of the factors that sticks out like a sore thumb is our heavy emphasis on "individualism" and our distrust of anyhting that smacks of "socialism". Even Australia, that famous nation of rugged individualists bred from prison-stock- has nationalized health care and no death penalty!

---------------------------------
It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

NOTIFY: Y  | REPLY  | REPLY WITH QUOTE  | PERMALINK  | TOP  | HOME

"Even Australia, that famous nation of rugged individualists bred from prison-stock- has nationalized health care and no death penalty!"

And when they outlawed gun ownership, crime skyrocketed. They allowed themselves to be taken in by the semingly innocuous socialism.

Yes, we are nation of individuals. And damn proud of it.

http://www.geoffmetcalf.com/guncontrol_20010302.html

NOTIFY: Y  | REPLY  | REPLY WITH QUOTE  | PERMALINK  | TOP  | HOME

Quote:

---

And when they outlawed gun ownership, crime skyrocketed

---

Their burglarly and car theft rate is about three times ours, but their firearm murder rate (0.00293678 per 1,000) is one-tenth ours (0.0279271 per 1,000). You would have to look at the details of gun ownership across a wide variety of nations in order to draw any sort of correlation. For example, Norway has a very high rate of gun ownership and a vanishingly low rate of burglarly. BUT the rules of gun ownership in Norway require that the gun be locked away in a burlgar-proof safe, which is not useful for home defense. OTOH, Finland has one of the highest gun ownership rates in the world, and while it per capita firearm murder rate is very high, so is its burglary rate.

While perusing the topic, I came across these papers, which I found interesting:

Quote:

---

Some social factors appear to have enormous impact on violent crime. Two social factors in particular have been getting increased attention from researchers lately; the first is media violence. Many sociologists do not consider it an accident that the crime wave that hit America in the 60s and 70s coincided with the first television generation coming of age. Dr. Brandon Centerwall has produced one of the most famous studies, which found that the mere introduction of television into a region causes its crime rate to double as soon as the first television generation comes of age. (1) In a 22-year study of 800 children from grade 2 to early adulthood, Leonard Eron and Rowell Huesmann found that the best predictor of later aggression was a heavy childhood diet of TV violence -- more so than poverty, grades, a single parent in the home or exposure to real violence. (2)

The second is income inequality. Although absolute poverty levels do not correlate too significantly with the crime rate, income inequality does (oddly enough). Two separate studies, one from Harvard, the other from Berkeley, compared state crime rates to their income inequality rates, and found that the states with the most inequality had the highest rates of homicide, violent crime and incarceration. This correlation holds internationally as well; Europe has much lower levels of inequality than the U.S., and much lower violent crime rates as well. In the U.S., the rising murder rate has accompanied a rising level of income inequality. In 1968, the Gini index of income inequality was a record low .348; by 1994, it had risen to .426, the highest level since the Great Depression. (3)

---

www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-gunownership.htm

Quote:

---

If anything, a review of the European experience demonstrates more guns correlating with less murder. Nine European nations (including Germany, Austria, Denmark and Norway) have more than 15,000 guns per 100,000 members of the population. Nine others (including Luxembourg, Russia, and Hungary) have fewer than 5,000 guns per 100,000 members of the population. But the aggregate murder rates of these nine low-gun-ownership nations are three times higher than those of the nine high-gun-ownership nations.

Some groups, particularly the gun lobby, might argue that this shows how widespread gun ownership actually reduces violence rates. There is substantial evidence that this is true in the United States, where gun ownership for self-defense is very common. But there is no evidence that Norwegians, Germans and other Europeans often keep guns for defense.

The reason that European nations with more guns tend to have lower violence is political rather than criminological. Gun ownership generally has no affect on how much violent crime a society has. Violent crime is determined by fundamental economic and sociocultural factors, not the mere availability of just one of an innumerable bevy of potential murder instruments. Politicians in nations with severe crime problems often think that banning guns will be a quick fix. But gun bans don't work; if anything, they make things worse. They disarm the law-abiding while being ignored by the violent and the criminal. Yet

NOTIFY: Y  | REPLY  | REPLY WITH QUOTE  | PERMALINK  | TOP  | HOME