6 ms·

People circle the block in there SUV 10 times, rather than walking, is because there main stream fear media is reminding them all the time that they are at risk

by sbhn 8y ago

People circle the block in there SUV 10 times, rather than walking, is because there main stream fear media is reminding them all the time that they are at risk of being knifed, or shot or beaten by random criminals all the time. And if there are police patrolling the streets, they are also likely to get harassed and questioned, or even suicided by cop. Sheesh, even security guards have the right to kill you with a choke hold. Drive your SUV to the end of the street, it’s safer.

nerdponx 8y ago
Where in the USA do people think like this? I don't know anyone who does.
- swiley 8y ago
  Most people I've been around think like this. So in Lynchburg and the very western suburban part of Richmond Virginia at least they do. Younger people who aren't in (have graduated) college seem to be a little more reasonable.
  - grandmczeb 8y ago
    I'm not sure if you have a very strange friend group, but I've never heard someone express a similar opinion.
    - swiley 8y ago
      I definitely do, it's not really a location thing.
  - eitally 8y ago
    <waves hi!> As a native Lynchburger who subsequently spent about 15 years in the Raleigh area before moving to San Jose a few years ago, ... I never felt this way growing up in Lynchburg. Yes, Lynchburg is approximately 50% white / 50% black, with approximately 0% any other ethnicity, and the majority of the white population is either exurbs or specific segregated parts of the city. But even though I grew up in Boonsboro I went to RS Payne Elementary downtown and then EC Glass for high school ... in HS, I freely wandered around that part of town after school (usually while waiting for sports practice of some sort). I never felt endangered. Nor, afaik, did my [mostly white] friends. That's a stupid anecdote, but I think it actually used to be better than it is now, and that mass & social media have created so much fearmongering that more people are hyper-insecure and wary of any unplanned interaction with anyone not in their in-group.
- tomjakubowski 8y ago
  I've encountered this maddening driving behavior in both suburban Chicago and Southern California, often while riding along in the car. I think it crops up anywhere there are shopping centers with huge parking lots though. The parking garages that indicate the number of available spaces on a level are a good counter to this: I find that most able-bodied folks will see the bottom few floors have few spaces open and go for a higher one.
- bluntfang 8y ago
  Pretty much everywhere there's a subset of the population that is ruled by fear induced by the media.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
    But wait, are the SUVs armored vehicles? Why are they getting knifed instead of gunned down? I'm intrigued by this narrative.
    - nostrademons 8y ago
      The threat model for people who think like this is muggers or drug dealers who come up to you on the sidewalk, not drive-by-shootings from a car. This is mostly inaccurate, but when it comes to peoples' fears, few things are rational. It's probably exacerbated because for people who grow up in low-density areas, the idea that the vast majority of people will just ignore you is a foreign concept. If you're in a small town and you see someone you know & like, you go up to them and chat. If you see someone you don't like, you bully them or get bullied. If you just ignore them, you likely get moved from the "like" to "don't like" category. If you extend this model out from a town of < 10K to a city of 1M, it collapses very quickly, but not before generating some very erroneous predictions.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  The suburbs. I grew up thinking that every time you walk through a dense urban neighborhood, you have to be on your guard lest you get knifed or shot or worse. Ironically, I didn't get this from my parents; my mom used to ride the subway alone into Manhattan for junior high, and my dad grew up in Zamboanga City. But when your hometown has only 13,000 people and literally zero crime, you're shuttled by car everywhere, your peers all live in the suburbs too, your only image of the city are the news reports about murders & drug dealing, and your one urban friend is a black dude from Dorchester who regales everyone with stories about how somebody got shot on his front step and that's why his parents insist he wake up at 5:30 AM to get bussed to a suburban school, you get a pretty biased perspective. There's a pretty strong selection bias maintaining this illusion too: people who are still in the suburbs for this reason will never come in contact with urban dwellers who aren't actually murderers, out of fear, and similarly the majority of urban dwellers aren't actually going to move out to the suburbs (and even if they did, their past lives in the city are just abstract tales to people who haven't experienced it). So much like other geographically-based stereotypes (like "immigrants are all bad hombres", "California is falling apart", "suburbanites are all boring Stepford Wives with nothing to do but gossip", "Appalachia is filled with uneducated hicks", and "religious people are wackos"), this remains a stubbornly persistent belief despite the reality.
- teekert 8y ago
  I once comments this [0], in short, In Galveston Texas walking is by itself considered a threat to normal, driving people! [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8111353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8111353
- casefields 8y ago
  Go on Nextdoor and look at the upper middle class and upper class neighborhoods. It’s full of those types.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
GhostVII 8y ago
Sounds like you have spent too much time watching the news, and not enough time out in the real world
- qwertay 8y ago
  Most people spend too much time watching the news. Its infected everything and pushed at us 24/7. It wouldn't surprise me if a large % of people have the same warped idea of what its like to walk somewhere.
virmundi 8y ago
Just get a gun. Kahr is like $250-300. LCP I is $180. It's a great pocket gun. I walk in one of the poorest cities in Florida at night. Not worried. Almost had to draw not due to people, but 2 strays. Learn to draw from the hip. If you're looking for self-defense, learn to shoot from the hip. Weaver position is great if you are in war. Hipshots are good if you're truly defending from within 15 ft. Center-mass accuracy is all you need.
- markbnj 8y ago
  Ironic, in a comment on a piece entitled "We regulate the wrong things."
  - virmundi 8y ago
    No, it’s not. If the majority of the adult population was armed, crime would drop. If you’re a criminal and know there is a 90% chance your target will be armed, will you attack? How about if the target is two people. The only irony is thinking that more regulation is a good idea.
    - int_19h 8y ago
      There are no studies showing that percentage of people carrying a firearm is in any way connected to the crime rate. Once you account for all the other variables, there isn't any correlation.
      - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
        > There are no studies showing that percentage of people carrying a firearm is in any way connected to the crime rate. Once you account for all the other variables, there isn't any correlation. Social science statistics are terrible. If you look at the statistic without controlling for anything, it's wrong. If you try to control for other factors, you can generally make the result be whatever you want. There are multiple overlapping reasons for this. One is that statistical controls, like statistics in general, don't reveal causation. If you want an effect to disappear, find something that correlates with the outcome and use it as a control. The effect disappears regardless of whether the control causes the outcome. The outcome can cause the control, or they can both have a shared cause, and you can still use it to erase the original effect. For example, do the demographics of the area affect the crime rate, or does the crime rate affect the demographics of the area? There are also arbitrarily many things that could be controlled for. Taking some of them into account will make the original relationship weaker. Taking others into account will make the original relationship stronger. Looking at only the ones that move the needle in the direction you want it to move lets you move it in that direction. If you really want to make something inconvenient disappear, just use the metric as the target. Audi claims its vehicles are safer than some competitors. Partisans collect data from two similar areas with a different rate of Audi ownership. The number of fatalities involving Audis is higher in the area with a higher number of Audis. Does this disprove Audi's safety claim? When you have a politically charged issue like this, you can't pretend that one side's numbers are true and the side's aren't, when the truth is they're both biased and therefore both invalid. This is a strong candidate for an adversarial collaboration, but to my knowledge this has not actually happened.
sctb 8y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18355668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18355668.

by sbhn 8y ago

nerdponx 8y ago

Where in the USA do people think like this? I don't know anyone who does.

swiley 8y ago
Most people I've been around think like this. So in Lynchburg and the very western suburban part of Richmond Virginia at least they do. Younger people who aren't in (have graduated) college seem to be a little more reasonable.
- grandmczeb 8y ago
  I'm not sure if you have a very strange friend group, but I've never heard someone express a similar opinion.
  - swiley 8y ago
    I definitely do, it's not really a location thing.
- eitally 8y ago
  <waves hi!> As a native Lynchburger who subsequently spent about 15 years in the Raleigh area before moving to San Jose a few years ago, ... I never felt this way growing up in Lynchburg. Yes, Lynchburg is approximately 50% white / 50% black, with approximately 0% any other ethnicity, and the majority of the white population is either exurbs or specific segregated parts of the city. But even though I grew up in Boonsboro I went to RS Payne Elementary downtown and then EC Glass for high school ... in HS, I freely wandered around that part of town after school (usually while waiting for sports practice of some sort). I never felt endangered. Nor, afaik, did my [mostly white] friends. That's a stupid anecdote, but I think it actually used to be better than it is now, and that mass & social media have created so much fearmongering that more people are hyper-insecure and wary of any unplanned interaction with anyone not in their in-group.
tomjakubowski 8y ago
I've encountered this maddening driving behavior in both suburban Chicago and Southern California, often while riding along in the car. I think it crops up anywhere there are shopping centers with huge parking lots though. The parking garages that indicate the number of available spaces on a level are a good counter to this: I find that most able-bodied folks will see the bottom few floors have few spaces open and go for a higher one.
bluntfang 8y ago
Pretty much everywhere there's a subset of the population that is ruled by fear induced by the media.
- onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
  But wait, are the SUVs armored vehicles? Why are they getting knifed instead of gunned down? I'm intrigued by this narrative.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    The threat model for people who think like this is muggers or drug dealers who come up to you on the sidewalk, not drive-by-shootings from a car. This is mostly inaccurate, but when it comes to peoples' fears, few things are rational. It's probably exacerbated because for people who grow up in low-density areas, the idea that the vast majority of people will just ignore you is a foreign concept. If you're in a small town and you see someone you know & like, you go up to them and chat. If you see someone you don't like, you bully them or get bullied. If you just ignore them, you likely get moved from the "like" to "don't like" category. If you extend this model out from a town of < 10K to a city of 1M, it collapses very quickly, but not before generating some very erroneous predictions.
nostrademons 8y ago
The suburbs. I grew up thinking that every time you walk through a dense urban neighborhood, you have to be on your guard lest you get knifed or shot or worse. Ironically, I didn't get this from my parents; my mom used to ride the subway alone into Manhattan for junior high, and my dad grew up in Zamboanga City. But when your hometown has only 13,000 people and literally zero crime, you're shuttled by car everywhere, your peers all live in the suburbs too, your only image of the city are the news reports about murders & drug dealing, and your one urban friend is a black dude from Dorchester who regales everyone with stories about how somebody got shot on his front step and that's why his parents insist he wake up at 5:30 AM to get bussed to a suburban school, you get a pretty biased perspective. There's a pretty strong selection bias maintaining this illusion too: people who are still in the suburbs for this reason will never come in contact with urban dwellers who aren't actually murderers, out of fear, and similarly the majority of urban dwellers aren't actually going to move out to the suburbs (and even if they did, their past lives in the city are just abstract tales to people who haven't experienced it). So much like other geographically-based stereotypes (like "immigrants are all bad hombres", "California is falling apart", "suburbanites are all boring Stepford Wives with nothing to do but gossip", "Appalachia is filled with uneducated hicks", and "religious people are wackos"), this remains a stubbornly persistent belief despite the reality.
teekert 8y ago
I once comments this [0], in short, In Galveston Texas walking is by itself considered a threat to normal, driving people! [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8111353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8111353
casefields 8y ago
Go on Nextdoor and look at the upper middle class and upper class neighborhoods. It’s full of those types.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

GhostVII 8y ago

Sounds like you have spent too much time watching the news, and not enough time out in the real world

qwertay 8y ago
Most people spend too much time watching the news. Its infected everything and pushed at us 24/7. It wouldn't surprise me if a large % of people have the same warped idea of what its like to walk somewhere.

virmundi 8y ago

Just get a gun. Kahr is like $250-300. LCP I is $180. It's a great pocket gun. I walk in one of the poorest cities in Florida at night. Not worried. Almost had to draw not due to people, but 2 strays. Learn to draw from the hip. If you're looking for self-defense, learn to shoot from the hip. Weaver position is great if you are in war. Hipshots are good if you're truly defending from within 15 ft. Center-mass accuracy is all you need.

markbnj 8y ago
Ironic, in a comment on a piece entitled "We regulate the wrong things."
- virmundi 8y ago
  No, it’s not. If the majority of the adult population was armed, crime would drop. If you’re a criminal and know there is a 90% chance your target will be armed, will you attack? How about if the target is two people. The only irony is thinking that more regulation is a good idea.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    There are no studies showing that percentage of people carrying a firearm is in any way connected to the crime rate. Once you account for all the other variables, there isn't any correlation.
    - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
      > There are no studies showing that percentage of people carrying a firearm is in any way connected to the crime rate. Once you account for all the other variables, there isn't any correlation. Social science statistics are terrible. If you look at the statistic without controlling for anything, it's wrong. If you try to control for other factors, you can generally make the result be whatever you want. There are multiple overlapping reasons for this. One is that statistical controls, like statistics in general, don't reveal causation. If you want an effect to disappear, find something that correlates with the outcome and use it as a control. The effect disappears regardless of whether the control causes the outcome. The outcome can cause the control, or they can both have a shared cause, and you can still use it to erase the original effect. For example, do the demographics of the area affect the crime rate, or does the crime rate affect the demographics of the area? There are also arbitrarily many things that could be controlled for. Taking some of them into account will make the original relationship weaker. Taking others into account will make the original relationship stronger. Looking at only the ones that move the needle in the direction you want it to move lets you move it in that direction. If you really want to make something inconvenient disappear, just use the metric as the target. Audi claims its vehicles are safer than some competitors. Partisans collect data from two similar areas with a different rate of Audi ownership. The number of fatalities involving Audis is higher in the area with a higher number of Audis. Does this disprove Audi's safety claim? When you have a politically charged issue like this, you can't pretend that one side's numbers are true and the side's aren't, when the truth is they're both biased and therefore both invalid. This is a strong candidate for an adversarial collaboration, but to my knowledge this has not actually happened.

sctb 8y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18355668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18355668.