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Power Femme
How Do You Identify?:
Cinnamon spiced, caramel colored, power-femme
Preferred Pronoun?:
She
Relationship Status:
Married to a wonderful horse girl
Join Date: Oct 2009
Location: Lat: 45.60 Lon: -122.60
Posts: 1,733
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Thanked 6,844 Times in 1,493 Posts
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Apocalipstic
Any thoughts on whyyy the rate of violence is going down in the US? I think it because abortion is legal. If the Repugs get their way and it becomes OK to deny people bortions and birth control, will violence return in pre 80's numbers per capita?
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Actually, the reason is that the United States is simply following the trend, albeit slower, that has been going on in Western Europe since the Enlightenment. For certain cultural reasons (some of it having to do with the Westward expansion) the United States has held on to its reluctance to surrender the legitimate use of force to the government longer than other nations. The United States is the only major industrialized nation that seems to still believe in 'frontier' (read ad hoc) justice. In Canada and Western Europe people have accepted that if someone breaks in your house, you call the cops. You don't go hunting for them and you don't pull out your hand cannon and start blasting away. In the United States, non-trivial numbers of people still live 'as if' they are on the frontier where there might not *be* a sheriff. They believe this even *if* they live in a major metropolitan area.
While the overall trend is downward in the nation whose geographical center is 38 00 N, 97 00 W, we will still lag behind Western Europe probably for the rest of my life.
Cheers
Aj
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"People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up." (Terry Pratchett)
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