I've always heard the saying thrown about that an armed society is a polite society. Certainly that was the case in Japan where a breach in etiquette could get you killed outright, and if you were a peasant, it was an honor to be used as sword bait.
So now we come to the United States. Certainly one can't use this logic in the present day due to mitigating circumstance; that being carry doesn't hold mainstream popularity due to any number of factors beyond the scope of this thread. So let's jump back to, say, the wild west. One would assume by the name given that the west was indeed wild and it's well known that the firearms proliferated on the frontier... But politeness?
Now I'll take this opportunity to note that i am not an expert on the expansion west through what would one day become the United States, but everything I've seen or heard (even here) says that a large portion of society was armed during this period and you could be shot for looking at somebody wrong. But somewhere along the way it would appear that 'armed' and 'polite' parted company.
Of course that situation has only deteriorated over time and I can only guess as to why that when the fledgling United States was sufficiently armed, politeness didn't swing to the extreme that it did in Japan. Maybe it wasn't for a long enough period? Japan manged to be an "armed" society (insofar as you can count a specific ruling caste armed) for several hundreds of years.
What say those of you with a bit more foundation on this armed society back when?
So now we come to the United States. Certainly one can't use this logic in the present day due to mitigating circumstance; that being carry doesn't hold mainstream popularity due to any number of factors beyond the scope of this thread. So let's jump back to, say, the wild west. One would assume by the name given that the west was indeed wild and it's well known that the firearms proliferated on the frontier... But politeness?
Now I'll take this opportunity to note that i am not an expert on the expansion west through what would one day become the United States, but everything I've seen or heard (even here) says that a large portion of society was armed during this period and you could be shot for looking at somebody wrong. But somewhere along the way it would appear that 'armed' and 'polite' parted company.
Of course that situation has only deteriorated over time and I can only guess as to why that when the fledgling United States was sufficiently armed, politeness didn't swing to the extreme that it did in Japan. Maybe it wasn't for a long enough period? Japan manged to be an "armed" society (insofar as you can count a specific ruling caste armed) for several hundreds of years.
What say those of you with a bit more foundation on this armed society back when?