Why in the hell did he feel he needed to have the arm on his side gardening?

"pack93z" wrote:

I really have to ask the question though, even though I am 100% pro gun.

Why in the hell did he feel he needed to have the arm on his side gardening?

Sounds a bit like he was pushing for a fight.. carry a gun if there is a purpose to carrying it.. not just to carry it for the carrying sake.

"pack93z" wrote:

"pack93z" wrote:

The Wild West was Much Safer than New York at its Tamest

Myth busting the Wild West.

In the cowboy towns that epitomized the Wild West: Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, and Caldwell, for the years from 1870 to 1885, there were only 45 total homicides. This equates to a rate of approximately 1 murder per 100,000 residents per year.
Source.

Measured by murder rate, in 2007 New York was 6 times; DC, 31 times; Newark, 37 times and Baltimore, a staggering 45 times more wild than the Wild Wild West.

DC 183 Murders (31 per 100,000 residents)
New York 494 Murders (6 per 100,000 residents)
Baltimore 281 Murders (45 per 100,000 residents)
Newark 104 Murders (37 per 100,000 residents)

Dispelling the myth of 'The Wild West'
February 17, 8:48 AM 74 comments

The dime store novel image of the West

These are interesting times in the fight to protect and enhance our rights as gun owners. In Wisconsin, we stand on the eve of an historic court ruling regarding open carry. In Texas, South Carolina, Oklahoma and Arkansas, local activists have succeeded in making their voices heard regarding restoring open carry to these otherwise gun-friendly states. With all of this pro-gun activity, it should come as little surprise that the anti-gun forces are out in-force repeating their aged mantra This isnt the wild west.
And this rhetoric is not limited to anti-gunners. Recently, I was quoted in a USA Today article about the open carry initiatives around the country and in that article, Texas Senator Jeff Wentworth (R), a supposedly pro-gun legislator denounced open carry saying "I think that's harkening too far back to the Wild West."

With all this talk of The Wild West, I thought it might be informative to look at the reality of crime in the wild west cattle towns and compare them to the peaceful streets of such eastern, gun-control paradises as DC, New York, Baltimore and Newark.

In his book, Frontier Violence: Another Look, author W. Eugene Hollon, provides us with these astonishing facts:

In Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, and Caldwell, for the years from 1870 to 1885, there were only 45 total homicides. This equates to a rate of approximately 1 murder per 100,000 residents per year.

In Abilene, supposedly one of the wildest of the cow towns, not a single person was killed in 1869 or 1870.

Zooming forward over a century to 2007, a quick look at Uniform Crime Report statistics shows us the following regarding the aforementioned gun control paradise cities of the east:

DC 183 Murders (31 per 100,000 residents)
New York 494 Murders (6 per 100,000 residents)
Baltimore 281 Murders (45 per 100,000 residents)
Newark 104 Murders (37 per 100,000 residents)

It doesnt take an advanced degree in statistics to see that a return to wild west levels of violent crime would be a huge improvement for the residents of these cities.

The truth of the matter is that the wild west wasnt wild at all not compared to a Saturday night in Newark.

Josh Says:
February 19th, 2009 at 9:59 am
Thats interesting, and reminds me of something Malcolm Gladwell mentions in his most recent book, Outliers. He mentions crime statistics for the South at one point in the book, saying that murder rates are/were higher in the South, but that property crimes and muggings lower. The research he cites in the book relates this fact to the code of honor popular in that culture (which comes from the Scots/Irish background of most of the residents, especially of the mountainous regions).

As long as both sets of data are statistically valid, they create an interesting portrait of human motivation.

It seems that, when everyone is heavily occupied with the business of survival, murder would be less frequent. The need to be able rely on your fellow human being in desperate times probably makes you less likely to kill him/her when you get upset. It does this by creating a necessary closeness between you, either literal physical closeness (small township), or metaphorical, in the sense of an empathic relationship to others in your situation.