One of the biggest difficulties in modern America is bridging the urban/rural divide:
My father, living in a rural area, purchased a shotgun for home defense -- when 911 was accidentally dialed, the sheriff's response time was roughly 30 minutes. Their primary political concerns revolve around taxes and regulation. Sometimes a bear walks through the neighbor's yard.
At our house in the city, on the other hand, I can throw five burritos and hit five other residences. I can't imagine firing that same shotgun in our house, as our windows and our neighbor's windows are in direct opposition. Police response times are quick, but we have people camping in the bushes across the street, a car break-in thrice a decade, and the occasional heroin addict passed out in the park, needle still in his arm.
These are two entirely different modalities of living, and we are trying to apply federal law to both. The second amendment is essential to our democracy, but it is increasingly difficult to argue with the growing calls to address gun violence as a public health threat. Nobody wants to get shot, everyone wants to live free and out from under the thumb of a tyrannical government. We can find a way.
There’s a big cultural divide between urban and rural Americans. It shows up in all sorts of contentious issues, not just this one. For example, urban Americans that would like to limit gun ownership where they live are largely prevented from doing so because of the preferences of rural Americans.
When the "urban/rural" divide is brought up in American political discourse, it's always done so describing extremes. Yet living in a city - even a large city, doesn't always mean living in an urban "pressure cooker," nor does living outside of a city mean seeing more wildlife than people. I live in a suburb of Austin. I don't hunt my own food or drink from a well, nor am I surrounded by concrete jungle.
The premise that urban and rural dwellers generally have such radically divergent ways of life that it's infeasible for a single entity to govern both is a bit of a populist myth.
For instance: gun control. Rules for millions of people crowded into a pressure-cooker city, vs rules for folks living a mile apart with varmints, police protection an hour away, hunting, are reasonably very different. Same for zoning, licensing, inspections, on and on.
Rural residents often get saddled with metro rules that make no sense.
It's a pretty interesting and important point. I think that it plays a central role in individual beliefs on politics as well:
If you live in an area of high density, people are your problems and it probably makes sense to you to generally limit their freedoms in favor of government control and general law and order.
If you live in an area of low density, you're immediate problems are generally not people, may be more survival related, and you are used to operating with MUCH greater independence, freedom, and self-reliance.
Applied to issues like gun control, government assistance programs, and taxation, it aligns pretty well.
Personally, I'm from an area where I routinely work in areas that are hours from cell reception or any form of help. I drive a big 4wd truck and a dirty 2-stroke chainsaw out of necessity. And, I carry a concealed pistol with me in the field.
This is often unfathomable to people that live in the bay area or Europe and I face criticism for my truck, for embracing individual rights to firearms, and I'm constantly faced with disdain from urban folks who like to insinuate that rural people are just stupid and ignorant. These people have never stared down a mountain lion 20 feet away, crouched and ready to pounce, lived without power or running water, nor faced a road wash-out that cut them off from civilization for weeks, or faced dozens of other situations I can recount where things like having the right to carry a loaded rifle in their truck might make a lot of sense. Nor can they understand the thin margins and lack of cash-flow people have to survive on in these places.
Very different worlds, and unfortunately it seems tough for people in different areas to acknowledge that they each have different needs.
I think you have some good points, but it seems you're against a straw-man version of city life that doesn't match what most city folks experience every day:
* "a home that was built during or since the 1950s"... is supposed to be preferable? A home built in the 80s will be considered old-fashioned in places like Seoul. (Besides, what's that got to do with city-versus-rural difference?)
* "I prefer to live in an area where I can leave my doors unlocked..." Some cities have crime problem. Others don't. Also, I have the impression it's always the (Americal) rural dwellers who say "You urbanite liberals have no idea why guns are necessary!" So I'm taking your argument with a grain of salt.
* "...rather than an environment where I have to be careful not to step in human feces when I walk between two parked cars." Well... then don't live in SF, I guess?
Just one example: city people trying to ban guns statewide while rural people live in places with dangerous wildlife (and more) will cause preventable deaths. In a city far more freedom must be curtailed in order for people to tolerate living near each other and rural folk often live out there precisely because they can't be happy making that trade-off.
'A suburb of Austin' may not be rural by many definitions. Its another city? Look at a map. See all those spaces between a city and its suburbs, and the next city and its suburbs? That's where 'rural' is.
I can see half a mile in any direction, and not see another human habitation. Clearly this is rural. And clearly, things around here work a little differently from a city. For instance, I pay for fire service (volunteer fire association; I donate). I essentially don't have police service except for cleaning up after major catastrophes (half a dozen sheriffs per 100 square miles). I saw an eagle swoop by my kitchen window the other night, with a rabbit in its claws (yeah eagle! I'm a gardener). When the deer get out of hand harvesting my garden before I do, I'm allowed to shoot them. With one of my guns, a bigger one because the little ones are for varmints like rabbit, skunk, rats, the occasional badger.
My interactions with a neighbor are purely voluntary, because other than annual discussions about fences (and the fireman's ball) we have little we need to talk about. There are no association rules; there are no inspections nor even inspectors. If my neighbor parks a bunch of trailers behind his windbreak in an ugly rusting mess, go neighbor. I guess I'll just plant a row of trees and wait 10 years to mask the view in that direction.
"These differences wouldn't matter so much if it weren't for the fact that the nation's urbanites increasingly govern those living in the hinterlands, even as vanishing rural Americans still feed and fuel the nation."
Ask someone in Central VT what they think of the way the state caters to the population mass in Burlington. Ask someone in upstate NY what they think of NYC running the show for all of NY. Illinois and Chicago. Ask someone in North Adams MA about what they think of the people in the Boston area. You'll often get something like "they're nothing like me but they basically run the state and tell me how to live my life only because there's so many of them"
Here's an example. Some hillbilly who wants to shoot a deer in upstate NY has to pay his way through all sorts of red tape in order to put an animal that's generally a pest (since there's so many of them) in his freezer. I talked to a game warden from NY who mentioned that even though it's illegal to take deer with .22, more deer are taken with .22 than any other caliber and his personal opinion was that because the policy and procedure around firearms and hunting permits/tags was expensive and bothersome people who intend to keep what they shoot just shoot what they please when they're given the opportunity (i.e. see deer on drive home from work, stop, shoot deer, put deer in truck, continue driving home) and .22 is the most convenient caliber for doing this because .22 revolvers are (relatively) cheap and plentiful. He went on to say that the rules and regulations are in tune with what a suburb of NY might want and not really appropriate in the rural areas and that it causes a lot of grief because once people start ignoring parts of the law it's a gateway to ignoring other parts. All of this was in the context of fish and game.
From a utilitarian standpoint it makes sense to favor the many in the city over the few in the countryside but there's usually a limit to how far you can apply general rules to social issues...
"At my house, I worry about whether the well will go dry. I lock the driveway gate at night, and if someone knocks after 10 p.m., I go to the door armed. Each night, I check the security lights in the barnyard and watch to ensure that coyotes aren't creeping too close from the vineyard. I wage a constant battle against the squirrels, woodpeckers and gophers that undermine the foundation, poke holes in the sheds and destroy irrigation ditches."
...this seems pretty atypical for someone living in the middle of nowhere. Most people grab their gun if someone they're not expecting comes to the door at 10pm regardless of where you live. Pretty much nobody has security lights, some people have lights on their driveway so they can work at night but not specifically security lights. Nobody without small livestock (sheep) cares about coyotes. Once the dumb ones do something dumb they get turned into evolutionary dead ends via some hot lead.
I think more universal rural challenges for people that are from more populated areas are... difficulty breaking into the community as an outsider. Lack of medical services. Lack of restaurants. Lack of services in general. I lived in some fairly populated suburbs for a decade or so before moving back to where I grew up in a fairly rural small town and the adjustment has been fairly difficult. Haven't really had any issues with any ATV's or shotguns in the middle of the night... I mean I'm sure it has happened but its not such a recurring issue that I'm losing sleep over it. We aren't too far from a fairly popular snowmobile route but I rather like the occasional whine while I'm cozy in bed!
Except not every city is midtown Manhattan, and not every rural area is the Ozarks. You can get "varmints" and long police response times in New York and LA. Most people in the "country" don't hunt, fish, or gather firewood, and most people in the "cities" aren't living hyperdense urbane chic lifestyles. In reality, most of the country lives in between these extremes.
Most Americans are city dwellers. It's not even close. And the trend has been consistently towards increased urbanization since the country's founding.
I'm not arguing we should ignore rural communities, just that we shouldn't rule out ideas that work in cities because they don't work outside cities.
Most people in the US live in an urban area, where urban solutions work. Only a small minority live in a rural area, though many living in suburbs like to pretend they are in a rural area.
I'm going to speculate wildly, and I have no basis for these assertions. If any of this is objectively wrong, please correct me.
1. Easier access to firearms, and other suicide methods. Gun ownership in rural areas is higher than in cities, and I'd wager that gun suicides by gun are a lot more likely to succeed than other methods (e.g., jumping off a building.)
2. People in rural areas may socialize less, and may have less of a support network. I live in New York, and if I want to see my friends after work, it's an extra 5 minutes on the train for us, and an easy way to get home after having a few rounds at the bar. If I were back in Dallas, it might be 45 minutes out of my way in traffic, and it would be much more difficult to get home and then back to work again if I couldn't drive my car home. In a more isolated area, your friends might live two hours from you, or two states over.
3. Some suicide attempts are actually cries for help, and in a dense city, more people may notice that cry.
The US has massive areas of rural space and a political system that gives a lot more power to rural areas than they realistically should have and we don't run into this problem so I don't think it's rural vs urban.
One of the biggest difficulties in modern America is bridging the urban/rural divide:
My father, living in a rural area, purchased a shotgun for home defense -- when 911 was accidentally dialed, the sheriff's response time was roughly 30 minutes. Their primary political concerns revolve around taxes and regulation. Sometimes a bear walks through the neighbor's yard.
At our house in the city, on the other hand, I can throw five burritos and hit five other residences. I can't imagine firing that same shotgun in our house, as our windows and our neighbor's windows are in direct opposition. Police response times are quick, but we have people camping in the bushes across the street, a car break-in thrice a decade, and the occasional heroin addict passed out in the park, needle still in his arm.
These are two entirely different modalities of living, and we are trying to apply federal law to both. The second amendment is essential to our democracy, but it is increasingly difficult to argue with the growing calls to address gun violence as a public health threat. Nobody wants to get shot, everyone wants to live free and out from under the thumb of a tyrannical government. We can find a way.
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