4 ms·
Last spring, her son, 10, announced he wanted to walk to soccer practice rather than be driven, a distance of about a mile. Several people who saw the boy walki
by m_eiman 17y ago
Last spring, her son, 10, announced he wanted to walk to soccer practice rather than be driven, a distance of about a mile. Several people who saw the boy walking alone called 911. A police officer stopped him, drove him the rest of the way and then reprimanded Mrs. Pierce.
To me, this is just insane. Walking a mile alone when you're ten years old shouldn't be an issue unless there's a riot going on or something.
What are you telling the kids about the world around them when you're terrified of letting them out into it? Not that people in general are decent people who can be trusted to not cause them any trouble, at least. Maybe this is connected to how "many" Americans feel they need guns to protect themselves?
- mhb 17y agoMaybe this is connected to how "many" Americans feel they need guns to protect themselves? It could also be related to how many Americans are afraid to trust others to have guns.
- gloob 17y agoAn intriguing hypothesis. It would seem sensible to suppose then that Canadians are a people so paralyzed with fear that all their children are homeschooled and they communicate with each other only over the Internet, looking at the gun laws in that country.
- mhb 17y agoFrom your snarky remark it would seem sensible to conclude that you are not aware that Canadian schoolchildren don't seem terribly more likely to be walking to school than their American counterparts. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/131723.php http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/131723.php
- Maascamp 17y agoYou are aware that your link is of a study that covers only two municipal regions, both in Quebec. Not to say that Canadian children definitely walk more (I don't have the evidence to state that), but this is hardly representative of Canada as a whole.
- bestes 17y agoGloob, can you expand on this?
- gloob 17y agoCanada has much stricter gun laws than the US. The impression I received from the post I was responding to was that the poster was suggesting a positive correlation between the general level of fearfulness in a population and the strictness of the gun laws in the region. Canadians would presumably be much more fearful than Americans in that case. I don't have any statistics to compare, sadly, but at the very least I would think it safe to say that any such relation is decidedly less than linear (or my neighbourhood would be overrun by paranoids), if such a relation exists at all.
- lutorm 17y agoThis was exactly how I felt when I moved to CA from Sweden. It reminds me of that passage in "Bowling for Columbine" about how the US is a society filled with fear.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- martincmartin 17y agoA coworker of mine refused to fly on the 4th anniversary of Sept. 11. When I suggested it might actually be safer due to heightened security, he became defensive. "When you have kids, you'll understand." Well, I now have two kids (aged 2 and 3 1/2), and I still don't worry about breaking a mirror, walking under a ladder, or flying on Sept. 11. I also want my kids to have a kind of self confidence and basic trust in the world. I think the local news is addictive, in the sense that it feeds a fear of not going out in the world, but instead staying glued to the TV.