I grew up in a rough and tumble area.
Over the years, I've had to hit the deck to avoid bullets, been robbed at gun point, had my home and car broken into, been forced to roughly toss an aggressive, chemically mood altered chap into a rat infested dumpster...and so on.
And yet...
And yet...
I suspect I'm far, far less fearful of crime than you appear to be.
Why is that, I wonder?
[WS:] Interesting point, indeed. In a similar way, people who survived the Holocaust and WW2 (I met quite a few of them in the old country) were much less incensed about this atrocity (in fact they joked about it and tried to forget) than the US-ers who experienced it only through the books.
My hunch is that it has something to do with the relationship between our emotions and our cognition. In the "normal" mode, if something arouses our fears - which is an automatic response of the part of our brain called amygdala http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amygdala - higher cognitive functions immediately kick in and evaluate the situation based on the material evidence whether the threat is warranted. So if the threat was triggered by an actual experience - the response is shaped by the material circumstances of that experience. This typically leads to a quick resolution - "threat" or "not a threat" and the appropriate response. What is more, this reaction is quickly learned and then conditions future responses in similar circumstances.
However, if the perception of threat is triggered by a vicarious or virtual stimuli - e.g. by reading about an atrocity in a book, or hearing about it from someone else - there is no immediate feedback from the material context that will allow the brain to control the initial response of the amygdala. This lack of the resolution may keep the perception of fear present for longer time, and even feed it into the higher cognitive functions (e.g. amygdala hijack http://www.eqtoday.com/archive/hijack.html ) . As a result, a person who experienced an atrocity vicariously or virtually may get into a positive and escalating loop or feedback in which the initial fear is being fed by the brain response that seeks and provides new (virtual) information that justifies and reinforces the initial fear.
That may explain why people who have been consistently exposed to actual threat are less fearful of that threat than people who have been exposed to such a threat only sporadically or virtually (e.g. by second-hand narratives.) In the same vein, children get really scared of hobgoblin tales they hear from adults, but are often less scared of strange animals than adults are.
A point of clarification. I am not fearful of the crime itself. I have lived in crime infested areas for more than 15 years, and I learned how to avoid getting caught in it, so far successfully (not counting minor property theft.) My reaction is not to the crime itself, but the leftist bullshit narratives on it. They get on my nerves for the reasons I already explained in my previous posting - disappointment. I expected more hard-nosed, critical analysis devoid of any self-righteousness, pieties and sacred cows, but what I get is counter-cultural self-righteousness, and counter-cultural pieties and sacred cows. It is like being sick of religion and signing for secularism, but receiving another dollop of religious tripe, say, Islamism instead of Christianity.
Wojtek