More on Guns and Crime

We talked a bit to Dervla last night about how safe this area feels to us. Kids are everywhere without adults -- on the busses, at the Clark's on the corner, and downtown in the village. Perhaps not kids as young as Johnny (7) but certainly ten-year-olds and older. As I said, other than the bit of traffic on the tight block right near our house going to the Clark's it feels pretty safe in terms of both cars and people.

Dervla encouraged us to be a bit cautious. She has a brother who lives in Massachusettes who has a theory that in countries where people don't have guns you might have more burglaries.

It is very difficult to personally compare. We don't live in a bad neighborhood in Minneapolis, but there are occasional hold-ups and drug deals near where we live (it used to be that because of our old very high hedge and a neighbor's fence across the street, that our corner was the site of more than a few drug deals, but we've changed things up a bit and that frequency has gone down). Having said that, I don't often see kids around alone. To and from school or the bus, sure, but definitely not in the droves that I see kids alone here. Maybe its just because American kids are too busy being driven from event to event. I'm not sure.

Dervla also talked about how child abduction is just not much of a problem here either. She said that it is just difficult to do as you can't get too far. She recollected two (apparently famous cases) abductions in her lifetime since she was a young girl.

I did a little bit of research on the topic and it is a larger problem than she mentioned, but still, it is not the problem we face in the US (a brief look indicates that the US versus Ireland is double the per-capita rate). It also doesn't seem to be random like it is at home:

"However, the rise in the number of foreigners coming to work in the State over the past decade has seen a growth in applications involving Eastern European countries and the United States.

Most children are snatched by one of their parents after a breakdown of the relationship.
In 15 of the 116 outgoing cases last year, foreign courts ordered the return of the children."

I'm not a sociologist and this is not my field but I'm sure it has a lot to do with the size of the country. Also, I don't know enough about the different kinds of crimes like this to know if they are systematically different in the two countries.