It is unfortunate that we have these issues. There are people who think that if we get rid of guns, the problems would end. I do not think so. And one of the main reasons is that I do not think that the allowance of gun ownership is the sole reason for the crime rate in the United States. I believe that it does contribute, but that it also helps even more than it contributes to the problem.
There are many factors that aggravate the crime rate, in my opinion, and some of them are:
1) Gun laws - Once again, not the main issue, and more good than harm is done with them, but it can not be denied that they do affect it some.
2) Population dispersement - There are areas where there are millions and millions of people packed in to small areas here. This has multiple negative effects where it concerns the crime rate. People generally like their space, so when you bunch too many people too closely together, tempers tend toward heated. Also, many, many crimes are what are called "crimes of opportunity" which means that a person who commits these crimes might not have if they would have had to go out of their way to do it. The more people you put together, the more times that these opportunities are going to present themselves. When this is combined with the anonimity that happens with being a single person in a large groups of people, the temptation to take advantage of these opportunities is heightened.
3) There is not the sense of community that used to exist here. Many, many people refuse to get involved in crimes they see being commites and this emboldens the thugs. The thugs in this country have become bold enough to wear shirts that warn people about helping in their capture. A popular phrase that they use on these shirts is "snitches get stitches".
4) The disparity in socio-economic status - There are very poor people here who are desparate for one reason or another (to feed their family, to support their drug habit...whatever) and being in these metropolitan areas gives them easy access to people who are wealthier (whether a little or a lot).
Now, I am not saying that these circumstances do not exist anywhere else, but look carefully at the other countries' structure and you don't see so many of these things together at the same time. And our own government has, in my own opinion, offered evidence that illegalizing guns will do nothing to change the crime rate. They used that excuse to ban assault weapons, but the statistics they argued did not drop during the 10-year ban.
GOOD!
Maybe my mistake. I used "deserved" in the sense of "the laws you need to have", sorry
