“Happy Slapping”

I’d not heard of “Happy Slapping” until I saw this video. Seems a popular pastime of the “yoots” of Britain is to just haul off and smack/punch/slap/whatever some random stranger while being videotaped; for later giggles as they watch the poor surprised schmoe getting whacked.

Sometimes things don’t seem to go as planned:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOjDLybldMU

“Happy Slapping” is basically unknown in the US, a nation that the rest of the world seems to view as extraordinarily violent. But the basic fact is, if you avoid a few specific locations (Detroit, Washington, D.C., oh, heck, pretty much the cities listed here), and if you stay out of criminal activities, then your chances of experiencing violent crime drop waaaay down. Not to zero, sadly, but still… if you chop criminal-on-criminal crimes out fo the stats, the US looks like a pretty safe place.

“Happy Slappers” in the US would stand a fair chance of getting their asses shot dead (it’s also not wise to play pranks on some people). Even the BBC noted the interesting fact that while Britain is disarmed and the US is full of gun nuts… it’s the US that “feels safe.”

A British man I met in Colorado recently told me he used to live in Kent but he moved to the American state of New Jersey and will not go home because it is, as he put it, “a gentler environment for bringing the kids up.”

This is New Jersey. Home of the Sopranos.

Brits arriving in New York, hoping to avoid being slaughtered on day one of their shopping mission to Manhattan are, by day two, beginning to wonder what all the fuss was about. By day three they have had had the scales lifted from their eyes.

I have met incredulous British tourists who have been shocked to the core by the peacefulness of the place, the lack of the violent undercurrent so ubiquitous in British cities, even British market towns.
…
Wait till you get to London Texas, or Glasgow Montana, or Oxford Mississippi or Virgin Utah, for that matter, where every household is required by local ordinance to possess a gun.

Folks will have guns in all of these places and if you break into their homes they will probably kill you.

They will occasionally kill each other in anger or by mistake, but you never feel as unsafe as you can feel in south London.

It is a paradox. Along with the guns there is a tranquillity and civility about American life of which most British people can only dream.

Actually… it’s NOT a paradox. It’s quite simple, really. Humans are creatures bred for violence, but capable of reason. Every one of us has, to one degree or another, an urge to hoist the Jolly Roger from time to time and lay waste. What stops us? There are internal psychological blocks such as ethics and morals, and occasionally religion (though that one can go pretty badly wrong), as well as training from your cultural group (and of course that one can go really wrong in a big hurry). And there are external psychological blocks, such as the fear of prison. But one of the most effective blocks against acts of random violence is the fear that you will receive an immediate violent response, either from your target, one of their friends, or just some unrelated passerby.

Takign guns away from people does not delete the urge to act the jackass. What it does do, however, is delete one of the fears about retribution, thus making acting the jackass a safer activity.

Of course, sometimes you act the jackass on the wrong badass… and sometimes you act the jackasswhile trying to defy the laws of physics. And physics will mess you up more than the meanest, angriest badass.