You know the story of the City Mouse and the Country Mouse, right? The City Mouse comes to the sticks to visit his Country cousin, and makes a lot of disparaging remarks about the rural nature of Country Mouse’s life. So Country Mouse visits the big city, and discovers that it’s dangerous, dirty, and confusing. Sure, there’s food and entertainment, but he quickly realizes it’s much better in the country.
This story comes to mind every time I start thinking about big cities like NYC or Chicago, Boston or Baltimore.
The problem, as I see it, isn’t so much that the city is dangerous, dirty, and confusing. It’s more that the city has so many people jammed into it, like sardines in a tin, that there have to be Extra Special Rules to keep it all moving. In the country (rural areas, and even suburban areas), there’s more space. That space allows for more home-made “social lubricant” and less rules.
In the big cities, there might just be a true need to disarm people (this is NOT me saying I agree with doing so, just that I see where the need might arise from). Since you don’t know everyone in your neighborhood (or even in your apartment building!), you can’t know that you’re living with good people. There’s simply so much population stacked one on top of the other that the freedoms taken for granted in less peopled areas can’t be enjoyed.
In big cities, you have smog. You have noise. You have traffic. You have people, oh so many people. You can’t get away from any of it, either.
Have you heard of John Calhoun’s experiments on rat utopia? TLDR: Rats like unlimited food, cozy rat condos, and lots of space. And if they get it, they rapidly overpopulate, overeat, and begin to do horrible, awful things. The studies talk about how rats would eventually get to the point where they would spend all of their time in open areas, surrounded by hundreds of other rats, waiting on the arrival of food. That’s basically all they’d do. The mothers didn’t carry to term, and the few that did often abandoned their infants. Sounds an awful lot like the Big Cities, doesn’t it?
I think that the dense population clusters of the handful of large cities are skewing all of our data… on everything. If we want to know how politics are really going, if we want to know how medicines are working, if we want to know what children are learning, we MUST start removing the top five largest cities (NYC, Los Angeles, Miami, Boston, and Louisville KY apparently, by density, though technically if we go by densest “metropolitan area”, NYC takes the first 9 out of 10 spots… let that sink in). I don’t think we can make any honest determinations about America as a country so long as those five cities are part of the equation.
I’ve thought about it. What if we brought back the city-state? What if the top ten densest cities (just to randomly pick a number) were declared separate, their own entities. They could use American money and passports, but their laws, rules, etc would all be curated by themselves. Just a note, that would cut the population of the rest of the country pretty much in half. And I think that half would be a lot happier.
If America could be Constitutional Carry… but you had to have whatever special permits to go into a city, that would be different. And possibly workable. I can happily avoid going to New York City. Let them worry about their own messes. Leave the rest of us alone, as we feed and clothe the rest of the country. Because we do!
I realize this is not something that could happen. We simply aren’t set up for it. But at least it’s AN answer, even if it isn’t THE answer. The other answer I rather like was introduced to me by Robert A. Heinlein in his book Starship Troopers. People who don’t serve their country, don’t get to vote. That doesn’t mean you have to fight… But you must serve to be given the right to vote. If you don’t have the right to vote, it’s not a big deal (for those who choose it). They can still own businesses, do commerce, work, drive, and everything else. They just can’t make any decisions that affect the country as a whole, because they haven’t learned how to put the country first. While Heinlein, in the book, admits that it’s not the only or necessarily the best sorting system in the world, it makes sure that the people doing the voting actually have some skin in the game. I think that’d be nice. Franchise for those who do something for the country they live in. Two years of service in return for the right to vote. But that’s another discussion.
Part of the un agenda is to have nobody living in “rural areas “.. they want everyone jammed into cities because its more environmentally friendly… and easy to control…. Its gonna be an interesting next couple years….
I will happily argue about how cities are not more environmentally friendly. LOL… I do think that one good thing that came out of the pandemic was that people learned they could work from home in a number of different jobs, and they learned that they could find better jobs. I know a lot of offices that have downsized a LOT, in office space rather than in people. With flex work, allowing people to work at home sometimes, and only come in for required meetings or once in a while to do things you can’t do at home, a lot of companies have been able to lower costs by making the office smaller rather than the workforce. That’s a win all around.
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I have a friend who’s off traveling around the country in his van while working remotely. No office for him! 😀
That last paragraph certainly is interesting. Equally interesting is the idea of making ‘Gun Ownership’ mandatory for everyone over the age of sixteen. It would take a few years, but eventually life in all areas of this nation would become much more civilized and safer, with big cities seeing the greater positive results. Government would also improve immensely. Everybody respects the gun, the more of them the better.
I have long entertained the idea of making it mandatory country-wide to train and arm all women when they reach the age of 18. I don’t even care what “arm” they choose, though of course I’d prefer firearms. But if knives or other arms are preferred, I wouldn’t be against that. I suspect about the time the third rapist got shot, suddenly there’d be a huge change in the number of rapes in the country.
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I do worry about arming in big cities. I’m all for it, in general, but when it comes to specifics I do worry about moments like what happened to Kyle Rittenhouse. In large cities, that’s going to happen repeatedly. The learning curve is decidedly slower the larger the city. I don’t want decent, arm-bearing people being punished for doing their civic duty.
Both Mrs B and I agree with you re armed women being harder to rape.
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Re the city persecution, chicken-and-egg. Right now places like NYC are “normalized” to the benefit of the criminals. We need to get to the point where it’s reversed, and the benefit of the doubt goes to the victims first. That will take a while but is, I think, possible. Of course the recent disparity of prosecution in NYC over subway self defense shows racism also has to be dealt with.
*Waves to Mrs. Boris*
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I agree re: benefiting criminals, however… I also am very strong on my view of “innocent until PROVEN guilty” and “beyond a reasonable doubt”. This is a hard one to keep in mind when it comes to rape accusations, though, because I always want to believe the victim. So this one comes under the heading, “It’s complicated.”
According to Bruen a regulation cannot survive a challenge if the scope of conduct is covered by the plain text of the Second Amendment AND if there is no history AND tradition of such a regulation from the Founding Era. I.e. if it is covered by the 2nd, then it is unconstitutional if the state cannot provide the regulations from the founding era that are analogous to the challenged regulation.
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There are multiple regulations from the founding era that state that all men are members of the Militia. There is an equal or greater number of regulations from the founding which state that all members of the militia must be able to muster with their self-provided weapons and ammunition.
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I think that a law requiring all The People to own a gun and be able to prove they own a gun with ammunition would survive a constitutional challenge, at least on 2A grounds.
I see two problems with the big city-state idea. One, it basically cedes control of ocean access and ports to the BCSs. I don’t trust those politicians to not fuck with the rest of the country.
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Two, borders. They need to be fixed so they can’t encroach any further. That might be problematic.
There are tons of problems with the city state idea. And frankly, there are way too many reasons it wouldn’t work. But it’s an interesting thought experiment, and one that I go back to frequently. Humans are not meant to live in hives. We’re not herd animals. We’re clan animals (look at the gangs in big cities… they’re clans, necessary to the well-being of the over-populated city areas). We do very poorly when we are stacked on top of one another in small areas.
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Example… Where I live is considered suburban, but we’re on the edge of rural. There are 141 people per square mile in my town, give or take, and that number is skewed high because of Manchester and Nashua and Concord. In NYC, there are 29,091 per square mile. In Manhattan alone, there are 74,781 people per square mile. That’s Just Wrong. I consider my area to be built up, and wish we could be back at our farm, but at least we aren’t living on top or under our neighbors.
Off to dig tunnels on Luna for me.
NYC is effectively a city state now. They enforced border restrictions unopposed during covid. They have the money, people, and influence to do whatever they want. They have their own tax structures over, above, and in addition to the state and fed. Nothing has ever stopped nyc for creating or enforcing unconstitutional laws.