dc koop

Years ago we were passing through a town somewhere in that State and stopped at a motel for the night. There were a whole bunch of dudes also staying there wearing combat fatigues but not regular US military issue. Most were young but some were a bit ripe in age to be active military. We wondered if they were "militias" (not the regular State militia) but those who run around in the backwoods training for that "race war" they're always predicting.

morpeth

Probably just hunting or pretending to so they could go out and drink a lot. Lots of very right-wing groups in the state, but I think the "militia: more likely in Montana. I spent 15 years living o working in north Idaho, most guys I met more interested in drinking , hunting and some just collecting arms. Had a friend who didn't hunt but had 7 guns.

What is amazing there is no control on who can buy at gun shows.

dc koop

Idaho is a great State. I love the place and you can buy a 4 bed, 3 garage house on a nice bit of acreage for half the price you'd pay for an over priced dog house in So Cal.

If the laws on buying firearms are somewhat lax in Idaho it's really not relevant to say other parts of the US where drugs and gang wars are a plague on the rest of the population and gun control really needs to be enforced.

If we didn't have family roots here in So Cal we'd move up there at the drop of a hat

dc koop

Sad story indeed. One can only try to imagine the miserable sod who would do such stuff. Our local fire department run a toys for kids program every Christmas. People don't come better than that

morpeth

Don't know about southern Idaho but north Idaho is great. Coeur d'Alene, Wallace, Sandpoint very nice places to live. A lot of people retire there but go to Arizona in winter.

Hiro11

This is an important point in the gun debate: it's not heavily armed rural outdoorsy/hunters (for urban elites: "rednecks") of popular imagination who are shooting people. In fact, states that are known for high rates of gun ownership, liberal gun laws and pickup trucks with gun racks (New Hampshire, Wyoming, Utah, Iowa, Idaho, North Dakota etc) have the lowest murder and gun murder rates in the country. These states have a total murder rate of between 1 and 1.5 per 100k population, very similar to western Europe. The gun murder rate in these states is about half of that. Similarly, the murder rates in "pro gun" states like Texas and Tennessee are skewed by atrocious murder rates in the cities contrasted with very safe (and very heavily armed) countrysides.

Let's take Wyoming, a state where essentially anyone can concealed carry, a state where it's ridiculously easy to buy guns, a state where 54% of people own a gun (one of the highest rate of gun ownership in the country), a state the NRA has cited as having ideal gun laws. Wyoming is awash in guns but has a murder rate of 1.3 / 100K, about the same as western Europe. Contrast that with Chicago where all guns are outright banned but with a murder rate of 15.6/100K, similar to the most dangerous parts of South America. The overall rate of gun ownership in Illinois is about half the rate in Wyoming but the overall gun murder rate is about 300% higher. Even that's skewed as outside of Chicago, Illinois is very safe and much more heavily armed.

This indicates to me that the role of gun ownership and strictness of gun laws are only one part of a complicated set of issues when discussing violent crime in the US.

MsElui

ive been to multiple boy scout flag retirement ceremonies (the flags are ceremoniously burnt in a special way and the metal pieces collected afterwards and often given to people)- so often take place at campfires). They have typically been extremely moving and much is made of veterans and the like who sacrificed for the flag. I always thought it was a lovely ceremony.

mrken30

I think the crime problem may be more to do with the disparities between the haves and have not. There is some extreme poverty and anti-establishment feeling in the US.

Hiro11

I mostly agree. No jobs, no prospects, no education and lack of effective policing generally leads to more violence. However, there are lots of rural areas with terrible economic conditions that regardless have low murder rates.

Pulaski

I agree with Hiro, there are areas of the US that are rural, poor, and strongly "anti-establishment" and have relatively low crime/murder rates, so poverty on it's own is not a good predictor of criminality.

I suspect that "poverty and drugs" is a better predictor. There are even better predictors still, but it is unclear exactly why those "other factors" are strong predictors when the impact of "poverty, poor education, and lack of economic opportunity" have such, er, diverse outcomes.

mrken30

That may be true, I think maybe problems arise where people go from being comfortable to being poor. Where there is a large disparity, or where it is possible to blame someone for the situation or if there is a sense of abandonment. Jealousy may also be a factor.

Where communities have always been poor, I think there is sense of community where people pull together.

morpeth

I don't know the statistics, but were murder rates lower during the depression than today ? Or in poor areas in the 1950;s compared today ?

Pulaski

Replace "abandonment" with "entitlement" and you might be on to something.

dc koop

I agree it's extremely complicated. I can understand why those in States like Wyoming and Idaho don't want to hear anything about gun control. Understandably they say that the problem isnt in their part of the world so let the places where the problem exists deal with it themselves.... but don't punish us either at the same time

Statistics show that the majority of Americans favour gun control laws to the extent that background checks need to be mandatory even at gun shows and certain kinds of weapons with rapid fire and large capacity magazines outlawed completely. NRA's Wayne LaPierre however isn't willing to budge and neither are his supporters in Congress. The fact that Obama who these people believe is a person sympathetic to Muslims and a liberal with dangerous liberal ideas makes them even less inclined to agree to any ban on any type of firearms.

Donald Trump on the other hand supports right to carry laws and no restriction on any kind of weapons. It will be interesting to see over the next four years where all this will go

mrken30

The two words bear close relationship, but when an industry collapses and takes workers jobs, and only the privilege are kept employed. The people who are abandoned and left on the scrap heap are the same people that feel entitled.

The other thing people need is space. Not so much of a problem in the US, but where homes are built on top of one another and there is no personal space, there seems to be a tension that builds up.