Feeling Safe in the United States

[Helmholtz Watson]

I travel. A lot. I live in Australia, but approximately one year in every four of my life thus far has been spent overseas. I've travelled by plane, by car, and as a child my family spent three years circumnavigating the world on a yacht. At present, I have been to every continent bar Antarctica, and a total of 45 countries. Most of these countries have been third world, poor, developing, or war-torn, and as a consequence I am not exactly unfamiliar with situations that could, potentially, be very dangerous. And yet recently, as I said above, I went to the United States for the first time not too long ago and the experience seriously shook me.

I just want to say this before I comment further, I truly envy you and your family. I hope one day I can say I have traveled as much as you have.


Now then....
I'm confused on how you could be more afraid of the US than of Sudan, especially when the country was in the middle of a civil war.

I'm guessing it's because of the context of the situation.

In Sudan he was basically in an active warzone and the guy with the Kalashnikov was a soldier or a member of a militia while in the US it was peace-time and the guy in possession of the gun was a civilian.

I get that, but I would still be more scared of an assault rifle than a pistol. Don't get me wrong, both are dangerous, but I would assume that a pistol pails in comparison to a assault rifle.

Today certainly isn't your lucky day, you messed up quoting me!

haha, yep. Better be sure to not place any bets today.

 

[renegade7]

Because it's a presidential election year. Everyone feels the need to act like the champion of their cause, because Obama's gonna take our guns away and Muslim invasion or something stupid.

Then there's the whole gun culture, which I really just don't understand.

And also it really depends on where you are. If you're in a more conservative state or a state where hunting is a common sport, expect guns. Same with low income ares in big cities.

 

[dyre]

I understand what you mean and it's just one of those things I'll never really understand about the States.

I can understand why some Americans have guns in their home for self defence purposes, but to walk around a city with a firearm on your person?

How crappy is your town if you feel the need to walk around with a gun?

Some of the towns here are pretty crappy

I keep my gun at home though, because I feel I'm more likely to accidentally shoot someone over a misunderstanding/illusory threat than actually get to play the hero.

 

[Smagmuck_]

when one of the armed militia came into the store. He was a big guy, in a flowing desert robe and with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder. Within a few minutes, we'd all introduced ourselves and a few of the American kids were getting their pictures taken with him. Very friendly chap. The point of that story is that in a time and place, I can handle being around guns.

Oh God, you ran into one of those gun owners...

I feel I should explain. Most gun owners here are very sensible people, and when they do carry they do in a discreet and safe manner, usually concealed carry. But, there's a small sect that goes way over the top. They openly carry firearms of all kinds and a camera, so when they're eventually stopped by the friendly neighborhood cop they can get all flustered and scream "MUH FREEDUMS"[footnote]Can be interchanged with "FASCISTS!", "IT'S MUH RIGHT!" or "STOP TRYIN' TO UHPRESS MEH!"[/footnote] while the officer calmly states that their disturbing the peace, and then they go upload that video to youtube with sensationalist titles like "FASCIST COP STOPS ME AND TRIES TO TAKE MY FREEDOMS.".

Now, in some rural places you'll find people who Open Carry rifles, like ranchers or pest controllers. But they usually carry nothing larger than a .223 rifle. Unless it's Alaska, in Alaska, expect to see people OC'ing rifles while mowing their lawns because Bears.

 

[piinyouri]

How crappy is your town if you feel the need to walk around with a gun?

If you lived in some of the cities here you would as well.

OT: Yeah we're all fucking crazy over here.
I'm hoping to move to Canada at some point in the distant future.

 

[Teshi]

I don't see anything particularly scary about legal concealed carry. It's not as though if someone wanted to do something nefarious with a handgun they'd be like, "oh, concealed carry is illegal, so I guess I won't hide this pistol under my jacket." The people who are doing it in accordance with the law aren't the danger.

I'm strongly in favor of gun control, because what's dangerous about guns in the US is how many there are floating around God knows where. I guarantee if I wanted to obtain a handgun that couldn't be linked to me through documentation I could get one in an hour or two. They're everywhere. But I don't see a big problem with someone carrying a gun registered to them - my view is that if a gun is registered to a person, they can generally be held responsible for what is done with it, and so are more likely to make better choices (like keeping it secure so it doesn't fall into the wrong hands).

 

[ohnoitsabear]

It's always entertaining to read threads like these with no fewer than six guns in a gun safe ten feet away from me (only two of them are mine, and the main purpose of all of them is hunting).

Anyway, the first thing you should try to understand about American gun culture is that, unless you have lived a majority of your life with it, you can never hope to really understand it. Hell, I don't even understand it in areas that don't have a large hunting population. In fact, the extent of the gun culture in America varies greatly depending on where you are in America.

The thing is, most of these people that do carry around guns have spent most of their lives around guns, so a gun in itself isn't terribly threatening. To somebody that hasn't spent a lot of time around guns, I can assume that they would seem much, much more dangerous than most gun owners here perceive them as.

That's not to say that most gun owners don't know how to use a gun safely, or don't know the dangers of a gun. Most of them do know how to use a gun safely, and thus are less afraid of guns.

Finally, very, very few people have ever used their guns for anything other than target practice or hunting. The odds that a random person in the street is going to shoot you is very, very low.

The point is, you don't have to like or understand the gun culture in America, but your fear was probably a little irrational.

 

[o_O]

Eh, I think it has more to do with it being one of those things you will never need, but if on the chance you do, you'll REALLY wish you had the damn thing.

So, are they paranoid? Yes. But I can't really blame them. No one thinks they'd ever get hit by lightning until they are.

 

[Ieyke]

For those of you that won't bother reading further than this, I went to the United States for the first time recently and, basically, have never felt more scared in my life. 'cos of the guns. Yeah, it's going to be that kind of topic.

Moving on, if any of you want a bit more information than that, then I'll start with some quick background about me. I travel. A lot. I live in Australia, but approximately one year in every four of my life thus far has been spent overseas. I've travelled by plane, by car, and as a child my family spent three years circumnavigating the world on a yacht. At present, I have been to every continent bar Antarctica, and a total of 45 countries. Most of these countries have been third world, poor, developing, or war-torn, and as a consequence I am not exactly unfamiliar with situations that could, potentially, be very dangerous. And yet recently, as I said above, I went to the United States for the first time not too long ago and the experience seriously shook me.

The experience in question wasn't exactly anything major. We were stopping over in some town, I forget the name (we were only there for the night before driving on to Seattle), and I, the geek that I am, decided to go check out a local videogame store. While I was there, browsing the shelves, a guy walked in with a gun. Not to rob the store, in fact, I didn't realise he had it until I heard him talking to the guy at the counter, who I figure must've been some friend of his. He must've only bought it recently, or something, because he took it out and showed it off and then put it away again. And that was it. But it seriously, seriously scared me, and I spent a lot of the rest of the trip rather on edge.

Now, I've seen guns before, and they don't necessarily scare me. Yeah, I'm a pretty big pacifist and hope that I never come into a situation where violence is the only answer. Thus far, it hasn't happened yet. I don't like guns, and I rather wish the things didn't exist. At the same time, I can deal with them, given the appropriate time and place. One of my favourite travel stories goes back to eating at a local restaurant in the Sudan during their civil war (this would've been around 2002-3, I think). We were with some American tourists we'd become friends with, eating our meals, when one of the armed militia came into the store. He was a big guy, in a flowing desert robe and with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder. Within a few minutes, we'd all introduced ourselves and a few of the American kids were getting their pictures taken with him. Very friendly chap. The point of that story is that in a time and place, I can handle being around guns. A civil war in a third world country where terrorism is rife, that is a time and a place I can see a gun being acceptable to cart around in everyday life.

What shocked me about going to America was that I saw guns being carried as if people were expecting to be caught in a firefight just walking down the streets. Now, I don't live there, but is the reality of the United States really such that people feel the need to behave the same way as someone in the middle of a civil war? It just seems truly bizarre. When I'm not travelling, here in Australia, I never see a gun. Ever. Even farmers I know don't keep guns, and Australian wildlife being what it is, I can kind of see how a gun could help fend off the inevitable attack by the local super spider.

So this, odds are, will likely devolve into a gun control debate. That's not really what I want to talk about, though. I'm more interested into whether people in the United States are really so scared that they feel the need to carry a lethal weapon on their body at all times in order to feel secure. Because to me, knowing that everyone around me could be concealing a gun does not make me feel remotely secure. It makes me feel like I'd prefer to be back in the Sudan, where at least they tended to carry the guns out in the open.

Also, the captcha is "know your rights", which given the subject matter is pretty funny.

I'm sorry, but I'm just laughing at you so hard right now....
No, people in the US aren't scared of where they live to the point where they feel the need to carry guns to feel secure.
I'm a Texan, so I live in gun central, and people don't carry guns "as if people were expecting to be caught in a firefight just walking down the streets".

There's no telling how many people around you at any given time have a concealed handgun license and have a pistol on them somewhere, but it's pretty much never that people just walk around with a rifle or something.

People have guns for the same reason that they wear shoes or have little flashlights on their keychains - not because they're afraid of stepping on something sharp or afraid of the dark, but simply so that they're equipped to handle sharp objects on the ground or needing to see in dark spaces.
Wild animals, shady part of town, or "just in case"? Carry a gun. Could be useful.




As for your hilarious experience, are you sure you didn't spend the night in Compton or something?
XD

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

While it's true a small percentage of us do, my good ol' patriotic intuition tells me that's not the case with this guy. Like you said, he came in to the store and showed it off to his buddy. Perhaps that's all there is to it. Believe me when I say you can't really go around overthinking and overanalyzing small town Americans.

He has a gun, he's legally allowed to carry it around on his person, so he does. It's not so much that he expects to use it on a moment's notice at every turn (though he probably could), it's just there. Perhaps it's for possible emergencies, or it could just be the fact he likes his awesome new firearm. If you really want to know the "why", maybe you should have spoken to him when you had the chance.

It's not like everyone in the US is ready to start a firefight on the spot. If that's the case, more of the criminal shootings I hear about in the news would be two-sided.

Well, a gun is a weapon. The vast majority of my prior experience with the things has been in places where people intend to use them as a weapon. Perhaps it is a tad irrational to go around assuming that everyone that has a gun intends to use it, but unfortunately that's kinda where my mind goes when I see a weapon.

To those asking, I'm not sure why it matters where I live in Australia. You can probably gather from my post that I clearly don't live somewhere where I would be accustomed to seeing guns in a first world setting, leading to my culture shock at their prevalence when in the States. It can be safely construed from that, I think, that wherever I live I don't feel it's nasty enough to warrant the use of guns.

And yeah GeneralTwinkle, I get the point that guns are sometimes, for want of a better word, desirable. That was sort of the point of mentioning all that travel experience. I've seen the parts of the world where, in order to stop the guys just across the border from trotting across and butchering your family, you might want to carry a gun around. Living in Australia, even the crappy, crime-filled parts of it, are not that bad. That's not an opinion, that's just a straight fact.

That's kind of the thing though, in the US guns aren't always a weapon. The US has a large competitive shooting community, probably the largest in the world, so a lot of the time guns are viewed in the same light as sporting equipment. You'll never know why the guy was carrying the gun, it may be that he was coming back from a shooting range, or was on his way there, or he could just be carrying it because he damn well can and for no other reason. I'm pretty sure that he doesn't necessarily expect to have to use the gun to defend himself every moment of every day, and I'm sure he isn't just itching to shoot someone, he just has a gun, and he has the right to carry it, so he does, and that's all there is to it.

 

[sextus the crazy]

I always find it interesting when people who don't live here in the states say they feel terrified coming here.

Maybe it's just a culture thing, but I find that notion kind of ridiculous actually.

EDIT: This is a country where you can drive a car at fifteen and a half years old (depending on the state). I'm much more terrified of those idiot drivers than any amount of guns.

Ditto this. There are lots of guns in the US. A large portion of them are used for hunting and aren't carried except during hunting. handguns are sometimes carried around (depends where you are), but even so, I don't think anyone expects to use them.

 

[the doom cannon]

Well I suppose I could drop my 2 cents here. I'm 21, I'm pro-guns, I love guns. I don't carry tho, mainly because college campuses don't allow any sort of weapon on the premises. I go to school in Cleveland, OH. I ALWAYS am watching my back when I walk around, broad daylight or 1 in the morning. This city has some very unfriendly inhabitants, maybe not as bad as say Chicago or Detroit, but it's not a walk in the park. There have been 10 incidents on my campus this year that have involved people being robbed at gunpoint or been mugged. I sometimes wonder about carrying, but then I realize that if somebody has a gun pointed at me, there is no way in hell I'm drawing, loading, cocking, and shooting before he moves his finger a half inch. Better to just carry a cheap wallet with 10 bucks in it along with your real one, just so you can throw it and run.

Back home in the suburbs of LA, I couldn't feel any safer. I can walk around at 2 in the morning without a care in the world. It really just depends on where you are.

 

[Launcelot111]

Between living in rural Virginia and some of the larger and more notorious cities in America, I can count on one hand the number of people I've seen walking around with guns.

Sure, my family has plenty of hunting weapons and many people I know have guns of all sorts, but I've never met anyone with the mentality about guns that foreigners always seem to fret about. Sure, that's only personal experience, but still, the issue seems overhyped

 

[Gavmando]

See, this is a perfect example of why I dont ever want to visit the US. I have no desire to be shot. (Another example is that the US collects your personal details like your fingerprints when you enter, and I dont want a foreign country having that over me.)

I work in public transport in Sydney, so i'm often in the worst parts of the city at the worst times of night. I've only ever felt treatened once in 8 years, and that was an ice addict who really wanted to punch my head in at Central Station. I got lucky and he didnt.

I'm often in the Auburn, Clyde and Granville areas and i've never seen any problems with gun crime. (I did once have a conversation with four Mormans from Las Vegas about guns and how they couldnt believe how calm and unworried we all were because we wern't all armed, and how if they were going out, they'd always carry a gun with them.) Those of you from Australia may recognise those suburbs as the place of a current and ongoing bikie war, and quite probably one of the most dangerous places in the country. But it's still not that bad.

Traveling around Sydney at bad times of night, i've never felt threatened by gun crime because we just dont have that many guns in this country. We dont need them. And if I were to travel to the US, I would definately feel uncomfortable. Fun fact: Psychopaths make up 1% of the population. And 2% of men are psychopaths. That means that there could possibly be up to 3 million male psychopaths in the US. And whilst not all of them would be threat and own guns, i'm pretty sure some would.
And that scares the shit out of me.

 

[Launcelot111]

Fun fact: Psychopaths make up 1% of the population. And 2% of men are psychopaths. That means that there could possibly be up to 3 million male psychopaths in the US.

Your numbers imply that all psychopaths are men (assuming 50/50 gender split in population). Is this consistent with your assertions? Also, if psychopaths are in every nation, why do guns scare you more than psychopaths themselves?

 

[angry_flashlight]

I remember being in a mall in Bellingham, Washington (near the US/Canada border) a few months ago and I saw a regular guy just walking around the mall with a pistol holstered on his hip, plainly displayed for all to see. I thought it strange to say the least. Suddenly I felt a whole lot less secure since I had not seen a single firearm so far on the trip. A mental arms race maybe?

 

[Xdeser2]

I was born and Raised (and still live in for that matter) Arizona, so this isn't too new too me. Im mostly okay with the second ammendment, but yes, in my mind you have to be completly devoid of common sense to just walk around with a fire arm.

Sadly people i know (including my father) justify this by saying "Oh well an armed society is a polite society." Which I would object to ANY day. For the most part, law enforcement keeps the streets safe.

 

[rednose1]

"Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering" -Benito "Benny" Mussolini

Live in Arkansas, guns are huge here. Own 4 myself, and while I don't hunt, I like to go out to the range with some buds and just spend all day shooting. It's fine if you don't find it fun as i do, but if you are scared and have the opportunity to learn more, why not take it? If there is one thing we like more than guns, it's talking about guns. Have yet to met a gun owner that wouldn't talk anyone's ear off about the gun he owns.

As to the whole notion of everyone is ready to shoot you, I suggest a different perspective; How much safer would you feel if anytime someone tried to pull some loony criminal antics, people around you were able to put a stop to it, armed with something other than cell phones and cameras?

 

[omega 616]

This might not be true, I always get the feeling from pro gun people that they are only a few steps away from either sat, hunched in a corner, jerkily moving there gun around saying "there coming for me" or walking down the street like there clearing a house.

You know how you see in films? Walking round with there butt stuck out, arms out straight moving round corners like there is a gun man round each one, maybe rolling from parked car to mail box.

That is just the feeling I get though.

 

[AngloDoom]

As to the whole notion of everyone is ready to shoot you, I suggest a different perspective; How much safer would you feel if anytime someone tried to pull some loony criminal antics, people around you were able to put a stop to it, armed with something other than cell phones and cameras?

I think that's the problem, the assumption that loony criminal antics can and will occur around you. It's like people I used to know who carry concealed weapons or knuckledusters with them and, if anything, it made them feel much more paranoid because they were carrying a constant reminder on them that something could happen.

Speaking as someone outside of any sort of 'gun culture', I think I can sympathise with the OP when the open possession of guns in the public scares them: just as how I would see a man carrying a shovel around him and expect him to need to use it at some point soon, seeing a man with a gun makes me feel that the person carrying it is expecting to have to use it soon.

It's just different cultures, I guess. I would see a man walking about with a gun in the same light as someone walking about with a knuckleduster on one hand and a flick-knife in the other - why carry it if you aren't looking to use it? I know it's not necessarily an accurate depiction of that person's intent but that's the only reason I can think to carry a weapon in England.