Maybe we should also consider the concept of mass transit? The increased likelihood of injury or death from increased transit time in automobiles alone is a health hazard.
Also, there's a TON of crazy people riding, literal homeless crazy people, or kind of thuggish people. There needs to be some sort of loitering code enforcement on the train along with more security. I feel uncomfortable as a dude, I bet women feel even more so.
Also need more train tracks!
Fix those problems people will ride transit way more. Thats the way to solve the traffic problem.
One of the ways to improve the public transit, as a whole, is to make people of all socioeconomic classes take transit. Consider New York, for instance, where millionaires are shoulder-to-shoulder with waiters, and homeless people on their commute... And it works surprisingly well.
Until politically wealthy people have to deal with the problem, they won't support any solutions.
In LA, it is exactly the opposite: mass transit is incredibly difficult, slow, and in some cases more expensive than driving. How can you "make people of all socioeconomic classes take transit" in that scenario?
Or, actually, just tear up the parking lots. You can do it by taxing under-utilized land.
It's obviously never going to happen, so people will keep spending ~$3-5,000/year on vehicles, and ~$1,000-2000/year on parking, for the dubious privilege of spending up to two hours a day in traffic. On the bright side, if you live that far from work, your housing is probably cheap.
Yeah, your house probably cost ONLY 500k-1mil!
And that's exactly why things are the way they are. Shockingly, given the choice, most people would happily trade a long commute for the ability to spread out and not pay through the nose for the privilege of being crammed on top of other people.
Surburban sprawl is unsustainable, but is paid for by new development, parking is free, or cheap, highways aren't tolled, costs of pollution aren't factored into your bill at the pump... When you live in the city, you still pay these costs, but you don't get to reap any of the benefits.
It doesn't work that well. NYC subways are disgusting, especially in the summer. And you can't prevent citizens from utilizing public resources just because they smell bad or are uncouth.
> Until politically wealthy people have to deal with the problem, they won't support any solutions.
We just passed a proposal allocating over $1 billion to house the homeless. I think that qualifies as a solution.
Or carry concealed permits. You'll have to repeal California's action that requires all new semi-auto's to have a unique firing pin. But then you don't have to worry traveling.
I carry. I keep odd hours in a small town. I walk every night .25 miles to my office at 8 PM and then back again around 2 AM. Never had any problem (probably the same as most people on the train). If I do, I've got protection.
Um, no. The crazy people won't care, the gangbangers will be better armed and generally in a group, and the single mugger will now take your wallet AND gun AND may shoot you if he gets the drop on you instead of just taking your wallet.
> in a small town
It shows. Your assessment of the probability of crime and how you will interact with it is completely wrong.
For the gangbangers, they don't really like to involve civilians in a gun fight. They save that for only the most extreme circumstances in territory protection/expansion. Honestly, not too afraid of them. A woman would benefit from a revolver in that situation. That's what my wife carries: Ruger LCR. No hammer so easy to pull from a purse (which is carried crossed over her). If she can't pull from the purse, she'll fire within it (taking the flash burn over rape, for example). In this instance the revolver will operate without catching the purse like a semi-auto would. At that point, they'd most likely run given the noise and possible loss of their friend.
As for the crazies, the point isn't to prevent them from being crazy by themselves. That's their right. It's to defend yourself if they turn that on you. When we go hiking, I carry a gun knowing the gators don't care. Doesn't mean it's useless.
But I have no idea if that could carry over to guns -- for one thing, they're more difficult to run away from.
[1] http://safe.met.police.uk/knife_crime_and_gun_crime/pressure...
However, it is true that many situations don't call for firearms, and knowing when and how to de-escalate are really the first things an armed citizen should know. Discretion is the better part of valor, keep it in your pants, etc.
Really?
1) Muggers
The LEO's I deal with are normally "Just give them your wallet and phone. Do not fight back."
Now, admittedly, most of this advice is from the US and being near big cities. In the US, we don't tend to have kidnappings--normally muggers will take your wallet and phone and run unless you are stupidly in some dangerous area.
2) Gangbangers
Generally will leave you alone unless it is a target of opportunity. However, teenagers are stupid and can consider truly bizarre things "disrespect". Combine this with drugs and you can get some exceptions.
3) Crazy/homeless
Generally the stuff they do never rises to the level of "I can shoot him" until it's too late for you to react.
And, this is, in fact, the crux of the situation. By the time the situation escalates to the level of "I am legally allowed to shoot this person" the situation is often too far gone for the gun to be helpful.
Now, I'm not a tiny female, so I don't present a "target of opportunity". However, women are more often the victim of the gun in the house from their partner than from random strangers.
Finally, my only interactions with concealed carry in my family are accidents where someone almost got shot unintentionally. Nobody in my extended family has ever had to use a gun to defend themselves, but there have been a handful of mishaps (thankfully, nobody harmed).
The statistics are against concealed carry except in fairly exceptional circumstances (jewelers, for example).
One carries in order to defend lives. One's own life, the lives of family, and if the situation warrants the lives of other innocent people. It's true that defending life with deadly force will get one in trouble in some jurisdictions. That's why it's better to live in the vast majority of jurisdictions where justified uses of deadly force prompt handshakes rather than criminal charges.
The best jurisdiction is one where it's hardly considered necessary to carry arms, or use deadly force. Gun ownership and the murder rate (and gun murder rate) seem roughly correlated here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_the_United_States_by...
In states that endorse "innocent until proven guilty", the police won't even lock you up or take your gun if you can make a plausible claim to have properly used force.
When the force is appropriate, we owe nothing to the deceased and their family. The deceased was a hazard, and the family set that hazard loose upon society. They owe us:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_fee
I see that your article does not distinguish legal gun ownership from illegal gun ownership. I suspect that "murder" might not be the obvious. (suicide? shot by cop? vehicular homocide?) Medical care varies greatly by state, changing survival odds. You may also be making a backwards assumption about cause and effect: people in places with lots of murder might feel a greater need to have a gun.
I try to imagine a San Francisco or Berkeley police chief telling people to shoot bad people dead. It's... not working. :-)
Also doesn't help that now everyone has expensive cell phones which attract thieves.
Once I was telling my friend about how I saw a woman pass out and start seizing on the subway at 5pm on a weekday. I pressed the emergency call button and people were all staring daggers at me, how dare I delay the train. My friend then said he had the same experience at 11pm at night and he was worried about physical violence.
It also doesn't help that the sheriffs only bother to stand at the turnstiles checking tickets and if you want to evade the fare, you just can just run.
"Synthetic weed" is a misnomer. Spice/K2/etc. are plant material that has been soaked with one or more "research chemicals" in clandestine manufacturing facilities. The research chemicals are drawn from a pool of partially identified but poorly understood substances that have very little in common with cannabinoids.
It's a crapshoot what chemical a spice user will end up ingesting and it may be a completely different compound than the last time they used the stuff.
This is pretty true. I'm an occasional metro/bus rider, and I'd guess I've been on more rides where there's someone with a clear mental health issue than rides without. And while most of those occasions it's benign, something everyone can ignore... for enough of them it's been intense enough people on the car/bus have been clearly uncomfortable and it wasn't clear confrontational behavior wasn't going to escalate into violence.
I could imagine some people would decide never to ride again.
Enforcement is probably only part of the puzzle, though. We have the same problem with other public spaces (say, libraries) because we don't have any coherent or effective policy for dealing with people who are suffering from mental illness. Perhaps not coincidentally, there's no straightforward market-based solution to that problem (to an even higher degree than traffic).
Sympathetic to those without a home, but it almost makes one want to never ride on the metro or bus again. Which is especially hard since I have no other means of transportation.
I'd rather just pay the aforementioned tolls than waste 2 hours of my day on a bus, every day. That would add up to years of my life wasted pretty quickly.
I'm far more hopeful for self driving cars than mass transit.
Buses (And really, any at-grade transportation that has to share the road with cars) are, unfortunately, not mass transit. 7 minutes vs an hour sounds atrocious.
You've never been to New York, London, Tokyo? Or any 0.5m+ city in Europe or Japan?
[1] https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com/2015/08/31/secret-project-...