Brits surprised at peaceful, gun-loving Americans

From the BBC...

Why is it then that so many Americans - and foreigners who come here - feel that the place is so, well, safe?

A British man I met in Colorado recently told me he used to live in Kent but he moved to the American state of New Jersey and will not go home because it is, as he put it, "a gentler environment for bringing the kids up." ...

Brits arriving in New York, hoping to avoid being slaughtered on day one of their shopping mission to Manhattan are, by day two, beginning to wonder what all the fuss was about. By day three they have had had the scales lifted from their eyes.

I have met incredulous British tourists who have been shocked to the core by the peacefulness of the place, the lack of the violent undercurrent so ubiquitous in British cities, even British market towns.

"It seems so nice here," they quaver....

They will occasionally kill each other in anger or by mistake, but you never feel as unsafe as you can feel in south London....

What surprises the British tourists is that, in areas of the US that look and feel like suburban Britain, there is simply less crime and much less violent crime.

Doors are left unlocked, public telephones unbroken....

It is an odd fact that a nation we associate - quite properly - with violence is also so serene, so unscarred by petty crime, so innocent of brawling.

The reason America is associated with violence is because Liberals and the Media like to exaggerate any incident of gun violence, and make it seem commonplace, when it isn't. I wouldn't call that "quite properly" unless one was overly reticent to abandon myths in the face of facts, as the author appears to be.

Posted by Danny Carlton at April 22, 2008 8:32 AM