> People in rural areas don’t lock their doors for the same reason they don’t wear seatbelts and drive drunk everywhere. They just don’t care.
Do you think the attitude towards risk is because they truly don't care about having their belongings stolen, or because they know there is less risk of that happening? Having lived in a rural area and in a few cities, my experience is the latter. No one wants to be robbed.
Also, people in rural areas driving drunk is mostly due to lack of transportation options. I'm certainly not condoning it, but Uber doesn't travel out into the sticks and there is no bus or train to hop on.
I don’t think that refutes their point that they don’t care. Having come from a rural area myself, the decision was to drink at home or a friends I was staying over at rather than drive drunk. They don’t care about the consequences compared to doing what they want
I also come from a rural area and I think you're missing some detail in the individual calculus. The chance of negative consequences drop so precipitously in some areas that, coupled with poor transportation options, it becomes primarily an individual risk in their eyes. They don't see a big issue with being over the limit when it's a road they drive everyday and encountering even a single vehicle on the way back is rare. It's not a lack of caring, it's just a different calculation.
I've never drove drunk (or even buzzed) and I'm not defending the practice, just trying to explain their point of view.
Being called a pussy for instance for not wanting to drive while smashed isn’t a result of a lack of transportation.
Neither, they just take fewer mitigations in response to the same level of risk because of cultural habits.
America in general (both rural and urban) has a very high crime rate by developed world standards. I grew up in <redacted> which has a lower crime rate than 99% of America, including the parts where people brag about how it's so safe that no one locks their doors, and everyone locks the doors to their houses and cars anyway, because that's just the cultural norm.
I’m in a rural area. I wear my seatbelt, along with everyone else I know. I don’t even drink. The only people I’ve ever known that have driven drunk were dumb teenagers. I lock my door, but I not only kept my high school car unlocked - I left the keys in it.
For two years I did that, and the only time it was “stolen” was when my friends skipped class, used it to drive to the bakery for some doughnuts, and deliberately parked it elsewhere as a prank. Do you really think that’s how it would have worked out in any major city?
I remember it being major news when a few houses were burgled when I was a kid.
Now, the biggest town in the county? Crime happens there all the time. It’s only 20,000 people but a lot of them are…lower rung.
I think that’s the real difference. When I walk in a major city or even that town, crime might happen to me. In the 20 mile radius around my house it’s very unlikely, and I very rarely see a cop unlike in NYC.
On a per capita basis "a few houses being burgled" in a rural area is probably more burglaries than NYC sees.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-07/is-new...
You are less likely to be murdered in NYC than the average rural area. I don't know where you live and it's possible that your rural area is safer than average, but in general the myth that so many smug rural Americans subscribe to that the typical rural area is safer than big bad New York City is just totally, completely wrong.
This doesn't match my experience living in a rural area. Most of the people I knew either avoided drinking (your WASP) or drank with their neighbors (your redneck.)
Rural areas account for 19% of the population but 56% of the DUI fatalities. That means a 5.5x higher fatality rate per capita.