> When I grew up (I'm 32), there were still murderers, kidnappers, drug dealers, gangs, etc. My parents and the parents of all my friends let us roam free from

> When I grew up (I'm 32), there were still murderers, kidnappers, drug dealers, gangs, etc. My parents and the parents of all my friends let us roam free from the minute we finished our chores until dark. They often let us decide for ourselves how we wanted to get our lunch, dinner, snacks, etc. We could choose our own transportation, our own paths. I treasured that freedom. Where you grew up, when you grew up, what was the population size and density vs. today? I'm a bit older, and had a similarly free-range childhood. The town I grew up in was on the fringes of farmland, on the edge of suburban sprawl. There wasn't even enough people yet for rush hour traffic to be congested. Nowadays that same town is overwhelmed with people. The streets I used to bicycle down carelessly are parking lots at rush hour. I still have family in the area, but it's a very different situation. There's more crime in absolute terms, there always will be with a larger population. Sure the media skews the population's perception of risks, making them even less able to think rationally about the probabilities. But it's not entirely to blame. There's very real change that happens when populations grow, the context becomes entirely different. Even if you keep crime rates constant during population growth, the absolute amount of crime happening has increased, it's visible. By the time I moved out in my early 20s, what used to be farms we'd bicycle to and eat raw ears of sweet corn from, had all become dense suburban housing developments interrupted only by busy streets and strip malls. I believe it's still possible to find suburban/rural fringes to raise a family, in the classical free-range fashion. But it seems like these days much of those opportunities are so economically depressed that it's prone to drugs/crime of a different sort. We don't seem to have many functioning healthy small town economies anymore, not from what I've seen anyways. It's usually a dying town with meth problems and a wal-mart somewhere on the horizon.