Cycloptichorn wrote:rosborne979 wrote:Cycloptichorn wrote:On the contrary; we have seen the results of the social expiriment in which everyone walks around armed. They are collectively referred to as 'everything before the industrial revolution.' And there was a hell of a lot higher murder and assualt rate then what we currently experience.
Do you think that societal conditions "pre industrial revolution" are the same as they are today?
Was everyone armed back then, or were there a lot of people in cities, unarmed like today?
How did the murder and assault rate compare relative to population, both in cities and rural areas?
Are you still certain that you know how our present day society would react to having everyone armed?
Are you contending that increasing the number of firearms being carried around is going to somehow lower the rate of firearm usage? For I must say, this is an entirely counter-intuitive position that you would have taken, and one which seems to ignore the extremely prevalent Crime of Passion, in which the perpetrator is not acting out of any sort of logic.
Cycloptichorn
Keep in mind that availability of guns and violent crime aren't necessarily in a causal relationship.
Also keep in mind that most pre-industrial-revolution societies had extreme measures of control over the weapons permitted to the mass of the populace. Knights got swords, peasants not only didn't, but were forbidden to obtain them. Even the British didn't seriously get around to the idea until the Industrial Revolution was already underway there; by the time other Western countries got the idea, the US was already well-established.
We do have a pretty good idea of what "everyone walking around armed" would look like, though - the American West in the 1800s. While it wasn't true that literally everyone was armed, certainly at the least every family had access to a firearm of some type. On the other hand, while we can certainly comment on the famed lawlessness of the period, a certain amount of that was due to the absence of a local governing authority; you don't need a posse if you have a police department. So its use as a historical parallel is limited, especially as most people's familiarity with the period is mostly drawn from movies which dramatized everything anyway.
All that said, even if "everyone walking around armed" would have a bad result, we know that's not necessarily true; virtually every household in Switzerland has a full-on military automatic weapon and ammunition, yet they are almost never used in crimes of any stripe.
Certainly the US has a higher murder rate than other countries, most of which aren't armed societies. At the same time, we have plenty of socio-economic factors that lead to a large amount of inner-city crime, and a society which is emphatically heterogeneous. (It's instructive that the murder rate among whites is in line with the other, supposedly peaceful, Western societies; the murder rate among black men and Hispanics makes up the difference. That's not to say that "those kinds of people are murderers", but they're much more frequently represented in the demographics from which criminals of any stripe are drawn...)
