Video: Quiet, quiet West
2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55
If our society returned to the time of the real "Wild West", that is, to the American period from 1861 to 1901, then the pipe dream of universal security and peace of mind of citizens would come true for modern "civilized" megacities …
I was probably wrong. It was necessary to write as it appeared in the title of one famous Hollywood film - "Wild, Wild West" (Wild, Wild West). After all, it is not for nothing that today on both sides of the Atlantic one can hear that only “professionals” should have weapons, and not ordinary parents and their, God forbid, children, otherwise we will turn into the “wild West”. Since in Russia, weapons are officially sold with enormous difficulties and restrictions, we are not as often, as the same Americans, pushed through horror stories about "lone shooters", "murders in schools", etc. nonsense. Although lately, if you have noticed, more and more often.
I'm not going to waste your time on exposing more than half (I think, about 80 percent) of these stories as frank pranks with the participation of not very good artists. You yourself can look at a lot of documentary research on the Internet about this, especially if you speak English. It only seems to you and me for some reason that people cannot have so much cynicism as to act out grief in front of the cameras for the allegedly dead daughter, wife, mother who died almost live on air. And there is enough cynicism, and the broadcast has long been crooked …
Let me start with the conclusion: if our society returned to the time of the real "Wild West", that is, to the American period from 1861 to 1901, then the pipe dream of universal security and peace of mind of citizens would come true for modern "civilized" megalopolises.
It never occurred to you to think and answer one very simple in its essence question: how do we know something? The answer will be obvious: from movies and books. Well, more, perhaps, from the textbooks. News from TV boxes and newspapers, I hope, you do not classify as knowledge. There are also stories of grandparents, eyewitnesses of certain events, but at some point we were taught to treat their opinions as something too subjective and therefore not worthy of attention. And in vain …
So, what do we know about the American Wild West, or rather, how do we imagine it? Charming villains who kill rustic Indians; hardened bandits robbing banks and whole trains; corrupt sheriffs who use their “license to kill” to the fullest; noble loners entering into an unequal struggle with all of the above characters; and crowds of ordinary inhabitants, with horror crawling from inside their squalid houses to the curtained windows and watching the atrocities taking place on the terrible, hostile streets.
Alas, the American crime statistics of the late 19th century refutes the rampant criminality so encouraged by modern mass media disinformation. Street gunfights were as rare as robbing banks and mail trains. That is why they immediately got on the pages of the newspapers of that time, as always hungry for "such things" in order to maintain their circulation. In the absence of something really serious, a message about every little thing got on their pages.
Eugene Hollon's research, for example, provides evidence that 45 murders were recorded in cowboy cities such as Abilene, Wichita, Dodge City and Caldwell between 1870 and 1885. In other words, 1 murder per 100,000 inhabitants per year. Lot? Now take some 21st century Baltimore, and the exact same calculation will give you a ratio of 45 killed per 100,000 live per year. And this, of course, without taking into account the killings of patients by doctors - a truly terrible statistics of modern "civilized" America (which should be discussed separately).
Research by another historian, Roger McGrath, who has had the leisure to tackle California's "gold-bearing" towns, shows that the current rate of robbery is 20 times, and theft is 40 times higher than those of those “wild” areas of the American West.
Imagine what our descendants will think about today's life if they begin to focus on all kinds of "cop" series or some foreign "Dexter" (by the way, I highly recommend him to fans of learning English from films), in which the Miami police have to deal with corpses dismembered on the beaches …
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