The US cultural and legal outlook on law & order (not the series) hasn't really changed in a hundred years. Yeah, there's some newfangled stuff about respecting the guys you arrest, and giving coloured people and women the same rights as white men, but it doesn't trickle down all that well, not even in the industrialised northeast. Amadou Dialo was brutally abused a decade ago by NYPD officers basically because he was black and because they could get away with it. The majority of law enforcers in the US are still male and Caucasian and the upbringing in much of the interior is still based on what they learned around the time of Al Capone & Machine Gun Kelley.
Guns are romanticised and become the stars of the show in TV fiction and in criminal statistics. But rather than rewrite the 2nd Amendment to reflect modern realities, many people retract sphincter-like around this right to carry lethal force. So the gun is still king and reptile-brain fear remains the basis for criminal activity, fear of same and its retribution by the People. Technology may change but the culture hasn't, and so Justice remains the same. Even the laws of the peace-and-love planet Argelius ("Wolf in the Fold"--Classic Trek) remained brutal and unchanged since before their Great Cultural Awakening some long time before the Enterprise came around and allow a Scottsman to cross paths with an Evil Entity who'd have left him holding the bag for murder. Justice remains a relfection of the history of the culture involved, and that will probably not change.
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zvi and
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Date: 2011-06-13 04:02 pm (UTC)Guns are romanticised and become the stars of the show in TV fiction and in criminal statistics. But rather than rewrite the 2nd Amendment to reflect modern realities, many people retract sphincter-like around this right to carry lethal force. So the gun is still king and reptile-brain fear remains the basis for criminal activity, fear of same and its retribution by the People. Technology may change but the culture hasn't, and so Justice remains the same. Even the laws of the peace-and-love planet Argelius ("Wolf in the Fold"--Classic Trek) remained brutal and unchanged since before their Great Cultural Awakening some long time before the Enterprise came around and allow a Scottsman to cross paths with an Evil Entity who'd have left him holding the bag for murder. Justice remains a relfection of the history of the culture involved, and that will probably not change.