Comment by adamrezich
3 days ago
When my mom attended the same high school I graduated from, in the 70s, kids who were hunters would leave firearms in racks on the back of their pickup trucks in the high school parking lot. Not only did said firearms never once get stolen or used to shoot anyone, but, such a thing was simply unthinkable.
When I attended the same high school in the 00s, we once were put on a district-wide lockdown because some kid at the other high school all the way across town had inadvertently left his paintball gun in the back seat of his (locked) car—after a weekend of fun in the woods with his friends—in the school parking lot, and a security officer saw it.
Now, today, we get periodic local PSAs urging people to not leave firearms in their locked cars in their own driveways at night, because people are breaking into cars, stealing the guns, and using them to commit crimes.
I won't speculate on how we forsook it, but clearly something here has been forsaken. That the way things were a mere ~50 years ago seems unthinkably impossible today clearly speaks volumes.
I remember the 70s and my experience was nothing like your mom's. Population centers have always been full of petty crime; rural places are still pretty free from crime. You can still move to plenty of towns with population <1000 in the US, and you'll have no trouble leaving your gun or laptop in your car there.
The one big difference though is today we have school shootings, so folks are pretty humorless about guns near schools. I'd love to hear your ideas for how to solve that, because they keep happening.
Your theory of urban/rural bifurcation is overly reductive. My city had a population of about 40,000 in the 70s (when guns were left in racks in the backs of trucks in the high school parking lot)—it's about twice that today. (I did however just return from visiting my wife's hometown in northern Idaho, which has a population of about 500, and indeed I did not feel the need to lock my car, despite keeping a firearm inside of it.)
I don't care to propose any solutions here, especially around such politically-volatile topics, because I believe the actual changes that transpired and the reasons for why they did are worth acknowledging and investigating first.
40,000 people live within a few miles of me. That isn't a city, that's a suburb or a town.
Also the leaving guns in vehicles thing could also be affected by another number here. And that is miles driven per capita and vehicles owned per household averages. That is you could have the same total number of thieves that steal guns, especially among those with more poverty, but as you increase the number of cars groups that could no longer afford them have them. Also the number of miles driven means the potential thieves are covering way more territory.
Anecdotally I heard about things like this in the late 80s and early 90s. Farmers were complaining that groups out of Chicago were running off with all the stuff they'd leave around all over the farm.
In addition starting in the mid 70s was a long recessionary period (stagflation) after decades of a good economy in the 60s that shook the US to the core.
2 replies →
> actual changes that transpired and the reasons for why they did
Well go on then. Let's hear your theory out loud.
1 reply →
There's definitely a rural element to it. I left probably $10,000 worth of construction equipment out for the stealing for 2 years while building my house in the country. Just totally unmonitored vacant property, surrounded by poor people in trailers who badly could have used the money if they cared to steal it. Of course neighbors would never think to steal it because burning your name in a small town is the same thing as banishment or starving to death because you'll never get another job / lover / friend / help.
It would have been gone in 15 minutes at my house in the city.
In a rural area, there’s only a handful of people who would notice the opportunity. Odds are pretty good that they won’t take it, because most people aren’t thieves. In the city, thousands of people will spot the opportunity and odds are good that a few of them are thieves.
> I won't speculate on how we forsook it, but clearly something was forsaken.
I cant sum it up properly but three things come to mind: Fear - we have been filled with fear, this in turn leads to more people forsaking responsibility and wanting the government to act as a nanny to protect them, which leads to a lot of childish behavior whether it be people acting helpless or people aping being big and tough. So fear leading to a lack of responsibility leading to childish behavior. This makes people more self centered and less considerate of others around them.
Edit, to add: This lack of responsibility is also tied to legal liability of being sued. Cant take down a crook because they might get hurt and sue which makes me wonder what kind of legal system we have which ignores the irresponsible act of criminality. To me it's "live and die by the sword" - you fuck around and you find out. Of course this can be reversed, a person taking action against a criminal can be hurt and then who is responsible? The liability cuts deeply both ways. There is no way to win unless that changes or we install a safety net.
I think it’s the news.
Our monkey brains can’t comprehend a world with billions of people in it. Stuff on the news is rare pretty much by definition. It gets rarer the broader your news gets. National news has stuff that’s much rarer than local, and world news is rarer still.
But your monkey brain doesn’t get that. It sees a story about somebody getting murdered and it does, holy shit somebody got murdered, this is bad! It sees these stories daily and it concludes that the world is incredibly dangerous.
This isn’t new, but the volume is way up. Decades ago, we might get twenty minutes of world news each night on the TV. Now we’re constantly bombarded with it.
People in developed countries are safer than pretty much any human has ever been before, and they feel more threatened than anyone before as well, because they’re exposed to a deluge of tragedies. The fact that the denominator on those tragedies is eight billion just doesn’t compute.
Oh, and leaded gasoline probably doesn’t help. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. The last cohort with substantial childhood exposure won’t retire for another two decades or so.
The news intentionally pushes stories to make people afraid, but I think that's only part of the problem. There's a ton of well-earned distrust in the institutions which are supposed to protect us. Our "justice" system is corrupt from top to bottom. Agencies that should be working to protect the public are instead helping corporations exploit them. Even our representatives don't actually represent us or our interests and vast numbers of people already don't see any point to voting in a clearly rigged system while the rest are gerrymandered and disenfranchised by it.
For most of American's history each generation was better off than the previous one, but that's no longer the case. People's standard of living is in decline. They are forced to watch their children struggle in ways they never had to. The things that made people feel safe and stable and part of a community like homes and jobs with pension plans are out of reach for most people. More and more people are sliding into poverty.
All of this leads to a situation where people increasingly feel that they have to look out for themselves and that makes people fearful and distrustful.
The problem is 'actual' reality is much more complicated than this.
50 years ago husbands beat the living shit out of their wives without recourse of the law. 50 years ago drunk driving was a socially acceptable past time. I knew people with dozens of DWIs and other that had killed people in alcohol related accidents that didn't get any prison time. What we call hate crimes now were just crimes that weren't investigated by the police.
This said, there is something that has change.
24/7 news and always on news with the internet. The fears we had of bad things happening to us were things we may have watched once a day, not every 15 minutes on the hour. That seemingly had a pretty large effect on how people viewed their safety in this world.
I'm going guess that at some point between the 70s and in 00s a lot of children were murdered in schools by people with guns.