You can suggest that I've sacrified liberty by choosing not to expose my valuables to thieves. Or one could also call it sensible behaviour based on observation of real circumstances. I read an article this spring in which a number was tossed out... 3,000 smartphones grabbed from pedestrians and sidewalk cafe customers in the first 3 months of 2015 if memory serves, within the city of San Francisco. While that's a small percentage of the population, it seems the odds are somewhat better than winning a significant amount (say, the value of a smartphone) with a scratch-and-win ticket. The article was written by journalist in my city, with comparisons drawn and police statements suggesting that while not quite so bad here, they've definitely seen a doubling or perhaps tripling of the grab-and-run type phone thefts in the past couple of years here. I have a nice phone (ie; not an apple product, no thanks, seen enough of my clients suffering data loss and broken screens with those things) and chose not to have it grabbed out of my hands. That's a small sacrifice, but comparing it to the bigger sacrifice of handing over my data including my roughly 1,200 person contacts list and all my business information, it's relatively insignificant. Like I said, if I have to use the thing in tricky public spaces (buses and light rail are the most likely places for such thefts, where crowds make pursuit or even adequate appraisal of large volumes of individuals difficult) I make a point of checking out my surrounding passengers carefully first. Awareness is key. If this kid in Washington DC had been more careful in how he stored his phone (pockets are awesome!) and had been watching his surroundings just a bit, perhaps he'd be alive today.
Sorry I messed up on the city by the way. All your big cities kind of blend together for me and I don't really travel to the US, only once in the past 20 years for a convention. But DC has a strict no-handguns law, doesn't it? So it'd be an even bigger illegal move for the victim in this case had he elected to carry a handgun, whether openly or concealed, with open carry obviously not an option unless he wished to be arrested or shot. Have a look at some relative numbers on this easy to read page:
http://www.nationmaster.com/country-inf ... ates/Crime
Sure we have almost as many guns per capita as you guys, but we don't carry them unless we're cops or gangsters. And the gangsters almost always manage to miss when they have their little wars, and when they do shoot someone it's rarely a bystander, though obviously that's tragic when it does occasionally happen. Canada is dramatically safer in almost every way than the USA, so I get it that you're fearful, as there's real violence to fear. But don't you guys ever get together and discuss how maybe, just maybe, the whole attitude around violence and especially guns might have a little something to do with the fact that your gun violence rate is dramatically higher than any developed country? Comparisons to Honduras or Haiti aren't relevant. Those are wild zones. I know people from countries like that, places they love dearly, but which they had to leave because things just got too crazy.
A Jamaican friend tried really hard to re-settle there a few years back. Lasted two years. Then he came back from shopping for dinner one afternoon and found bits of someone scattered around his front yard, and kids standing around in shock, blood everywhere. Someone explained that a guy had $50 and got himself chopped up by some guys who wanted the $50. He still tried to stay but then a good friend was murdered for slightly more cash than that, a fine old fellow who was a grandfather of the Jamaican jazz scene and never hurt anyone.
If you pursue this path of violence-answering-violence, this seemingly bible-driven notion that and eye for an eye will somehow result in peace, you're heading down the same road. Being among the richer classes does not grant you some sort of right to murder based on property values, it just doesn't, any more than being poor or addicted or both grants some thief the right to murder in order to access cash and property. You aren't 'better' simply because you have a weapon and a bit of training. You can call me or even my country all the silly names you like, but the facts regarding the level of hostility and the tragic outcomes speak for themselves. Canada's crime rates are at their lowest rates ever, in almost every category, though white collar theft is of course thriving. No one punishes the rich when they steal, especially if their victims are the poor.
Thanks for that addition silencertalk; it addresses what I said about the phone tucked in the belt nicely, along with all manner of other sorts of carelessness. People often think they have a right to treat the world like their living room when it just ain't so. Just as some places (admittedly very few these days) don't have a McDonald's, there are a lot of places one can travel, including in my country and obviously in the USA, where flaunting one's wealth openly is simply foolish. Making simple changes in behaviour to discourage easy theft or even the recognition of wealth makes sense. If you don't wag the hotdog in the air, seagulls won't swoop down and grab it.
