Everybody for the most part knows their place. That is changing now, I would presume, as their economy is transforming as American jobs go overseas to that country and a middle-class emerges.
In my casual opinion, it probaby also helps that, unlike Americans, Indians are not bombarded daily with advertisements for things they can't afford but are told they need.
Well, let me expand that. They are not bombarded anywhere nearly as much as Americans are. Nowadays it seems that every vertical surface contains an advertisement for one thing or another, and the mailbox is full of credit-card applications from predatory lending companies so they can have the advertiser-supplied dream life.
Again, we also have a bad drug problem and the gangs that supply them. How young are the kids that get involved? 14? 12? 10? The ones being messengers and lookouts and runners?
Despite the hysteria, school-age kids are much more likely to die on school property from playing football than from gunfire, even factoring in Columbine.
You are overlooking the key word here:
American children are at higher risk to die of gun violence than children in other high-income nations. One study comparing violent deaths of five- to fourteen-year olds living in the U.S. and in 25 other high-income countries in the 1990s indicated that America had a gun homicide rate 17 times higher than the rate of the other countries combined. The U.S. had 10 times the gun suicide rate of the other countries."
Gun.
If there were fewer guns in America, presumebly there would be few
gun crimes and fewer
gun suicides. But would the overall crime rate, the overall homicide rate, and the overall suicide rate change?
I don't know, but I doubt it. As the article you stated above says,
He compares homicide rates among what he describes as "frontier" countries: the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. These nations have in common per capita incomes, cultures, histories, and language. By 2000, the U.S. actually had lower rates of property crime and violent crime–such as assault–than each of the other countries.
So the relative lack of guns does not stop property and violent crime.
My personal problem with that paragraph is that, compared to the other three nations, we have many more urban and poor areas, we have a higher population density, we have a drug-use problem that the other countries don't have, and we are much less homogeneous.
For example, Australia is Caucasian 92%, Asian 7%, aboriginal and other 1%
New Zealand: European 69.8%, Maori 7.9%, Asian 5.7%, Pacific islander 4.4%, other 0.5%, mixed 7.8%, unspecified 3.8%
Canada: British Isles origin 28%, French origin 23%, other European 15%, Amerindian 2%, other, mostly Asian, African, Arab 6%, mixed background 26%. That totals up to 66% European, mixed 26%, and 'other' 8%, but Nationmaster is unclear if the 'mixed' included inter-racial, or just part English and part French.
United States: white 81.7%, black 12.9%, Asian 4.2%, Amerindian and Alaska native 1%, native Hawaiian and other Pacific islander 0.2%. However, included in the 'white' number are a lot of Latinos, which are ethnically culturally, and linguistically different from traditional 'white' America.
A further thing I would like to point out is that our non-gun murder rate is high as well. Our homicide rate is 4.3 per 100,000 per year. Our gun homicide rate is 2.8, so our non-gun rate is 1.5 per 100,000 per year.
That puts us in the region of Iceland's, Australia's, and Canada's
combined rates with just our non-gun weapons.
In order for your ideas to be valid in this case, we would have to assume that
every single gun-wielding murderer would have stayed home and watched TV instead of killing. Since, as you pointed out earlier, most people know their killer, I'd say that is pretty unlikely.
A good part of the gun murders would instead be done with 'other'. So now we have the original non-gun homicide rate of 1.5, plus the new gun-converted-to-non-gun homicide rate.
What do you think for a conversion rate? 25%? 50%? 75%?
That gives us a gun-converted-to-non-gun homicide rate of 0.7, 1.4, or 2.1, for a total of either 2.2, 2.9, or 3.6, all three of which is *still* a lot higher than Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. Or industrialized Europe, for that matter.
The real problem here is that for for some sort of gun ban to work, it would have to done balls-to-the-wall nationwide. And after spending hundreds of billions of dollars compensating people for the guns the govenment confiscated, and unknown more billions on police raids, court costs, prison time, and the like, the end result wouldn't be too impressive. And it would be years coming, if at all. In Britian they are still waiting for the lower crime and homicide rates after their gun bans.
That same money invested in stronger police forces would do a lot more to lower both the homicide and crime rates, and faster. Or investment in schooling. Or economic investment. Remember, crime plummented under Clinton's good economy and COPS program.
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