Element; I'm sure that you saw your share of gang violence and misused firearms down in Louisiana. My family lived in Tyler Texas for about a decade, and I visited them a few times (I was older than my siblings and out of the parents house at that point). I visited Louisiana on two of those occasions. I think it would be fair to say that the primary cause of the gun violence there is not the guns, but the desperately poor people and the rampant substance abuse. Sure this could tie back to the economy to a point, but lots of it would also tie to the poor education rate and many other factors. The guns don't aim and discharge themselves, they are a symptom of a much larger social problem that we're fortunate to have relatively little of up here in Alberta. Without guns those same people would be resorting to more stabbing, bludgeoning and beating to accomplish their killing. Your understandable bias against handguns is projecting responsibility on an inanimate object.
When the major flooding hit Louisiana about 6-7 or so years back a lot of refugees hit Tyler to escape and there was a spike in the crime rate. Unemployable people who were escaping the nothing they had in New Orleans simply continued their lifestyles and means of support where the ground was a little more dry.
__________________
"The trouble with people idiot-proofing things, is the resulting evolution of the idiot." Me
|