Originally Posted by
cclaxton
AMC, We have been having a friendly exchange and I would hope that can continue. I certainly didn't mean to imply you don't have great experience in human behavior. However, you made a generalization when you suggested "outlaws" are not part of the community, and you didn't qualify that generalization. But let's not get bent out of shape over how we expressed ourselves or make this personal and get back to the point that you made about criminals not being members of the community.
I recently became acquainted with a black man living in the hoods of Baltimore. He is a good man, but lives in a "community" that has a lot of ex-cons, criminals, and gangs. But he says there are more good people there than criminals, and he carries a gun to protect himself from the bad. But his view is that there is a "community" that tolerates the bad because they are family/friends, and they don't trust the cops. And there's a lot of the good who want the criminals to "see the light" and turn in their guns and their bad ways, which he thinks is naive and impractical and will never happen.
My point is that "community" is very local and diverse, and the extent to which that community is accepting of criminal actors and those that are intolerant of them is one thing that makes our communities different. My own view is that laws are too broad and punitive an instrument to use to affect social and cultural changes or to accommodate the differences of each community. Change takes time, one step at a time.