differentia specifica (was: guns & purses (was Re: guns & crime)

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Fri Oct 20 08:24:02 PDT 2000


At 02:38 PM 10/20/00 +0000, Justin wrote:
>Recent work by Gary Wills and others doesn't support this. Apparently guns
>were unsual in colonial days because theyw ere expensive, unreliable, and
>inaccurate. What put a gun in every housew was the federal government during
>the Civil War--the NRA started after the war to help train the newsly armed
>citizenry not to kill itself by accident. So, ironically, guns were not a
>bulkwark of liberty against the government. It was the hated tyrannical
>jackbooted feds who put guns into your cold dead fingers. --jks

Interesting. But then, how do you explain within-nation differences i.e. differences between states and region in their attitudes toward gun ownership? Why is it that there are fewer gun crazies in, say, New England than in Texas? One possibility is is that the former has been colonised earlier and thus have a more stable community than the later.

Correlation between lawlessness and migration is quite well established in criminology (cf. the "zones intransition" study in Chicago in 1930s). Two main reasons for that is that: - migrants tend marginal elements in their "native" society (the well adapted have no incentive to migrate); and more importatntly - geographic mobility destroys community ties; since embeddedness in a community is a strong crime deterrent, and migration destroys that embeddedness, migrant communities tend to be more crime ridden. I think that can go a long way in explaining violence and suicide in some suburbs.

wojtek



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