From: Dwayne (ddraig@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Jul 06 1998 - 08:21:10 MDT
Michael Nielsen wrote:
>
>
> I don't know why this is so. Gun laws seemed the obvious answer to me,
> but a correspondent pointed out that only one quarter of murders in the
> US are done with a gun. I didn't check the figure, but he's a reliable
> guy, and I assume he knows his stuff. This fact does shoot a hole
> (couldn't resist, sorry :-) in my hypothesis. I've been curious ever
> since why, even if you simply remove all the gun deaths by fiat, there
> are still so many murders in the US.
My experience online seems to suggest that americans tend to
react to disagreement far more aggressively than europeans. Media
portrayal tends to support this. Maybe americans overreact in
arguments to such an extent that people get violent?
Note that this is based on the interactions I have had online. I
haven't been to the US, although a friend has just moved to
Boston from Melbourne and he said that americans seem to be
"drama queens" compared to what he is used to here, in other
words they dramatically overreact in a given situation. This was
his response when I asked him if there was much difference
between Melbourne and Boston, so it seems to be what struck him
as the most obvious difference. He's been in Boston for about 18
months now.
> > >While this might be true in a country where the national sport is to get
> > drunk and beat your wife, it is not so here...
>
> <sound of my mind boggling>
'Twas a cheap shot, wasn't it?
> > Calm down, Michael. This doesn't help.
>
> This wasn't addressed to me, but right at the moment, it sounds like very
> good advice, which I'll try to take in the interest of keeping the S/N
> high.
It was addressed to Michael Lorry, who made that dodgy comment.
Dwayne
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