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Yes, because the only way people ever get a sense of what the "good" and "bad" parts of town are is from GIS data and not by opening their window and noticing that they live in a beautiful neighborhood of detached single-family homes with carefully maintained lawns and not a graffiti-covered ghetto. Yes, he probably watched TV and local news with its inordinate focus on 'if it bleeds it leads" crime coverage. This horribly biased mainstream media may have misled him into thinking he was likely to be a victim of violent crime, and so he gunned down a black band geek (edit: in what would have been) the first murder in KC in 2023 to take place north of the Missouri River. Or he may have just been an addled old man who didn't consume much news and made a mistake.
Either way, the issue was not, as you asserted originally, that this guy watched society collapse around him. He may have watched society collapse on TV and become confused.
If it's anything like the area I left, you can tell which way the wind is blowing.
You show up to the area, fresh faced and optimistic. You quickly notice there is a street below which... well... you don't want to be there after night. You notice every time you drive by there, maybe to take a shortcut, somewhere along your route you notice someone being arrested. But it's fine! You don't live there!
But it's only like, 10 miles from you.
Three years in, the shopping center with the pizza place you used to love becomes... well... uncomfortable. More and more people are getting robbed in the parking lot. Sometimes a body shows up in the woods behind it.
But it's fine, that's still like, 5 miles from you.
4 more years go by. The corner gas station you fill up at starts getting hit every few months. People just walking into the street to stop your car and yell at you for money. Break ins are increasing. It's no longer safe to leave you car parked on the street. You complain about it, and people treat you like you should have known better than to live there. Often people who are like you were 10 years ago. Confident if they just live 5-10 miles north of where you are now, they'll be fine for the foreseeable future.
I put about 50 miles between myself and the problem this time around. It would be nice if that lasted until I'm 85. But I know I can't count on it. Every now and again some felons decide to take a felon vacation. It's like a normal vacation, only instead of going to the beach, they drive a county or two over and rob some house in the middle of nowhere for kicks. I guess even felons get bored and need to spice things up.
Yeah that's definitely a thing that can happen, but was that happening in Nashua? It doesn't look like murders we're spreading there, maybe you have some data about other crimes?
A lot starts happening before bodies begin appearing. Including people getting shot near you who don't die of their wounds. Because at the cusp of the tide is a zone that still has largely functional civil services. Like a hospital with an ER that's not crushingly overcapacity with trauma victims most nights.
One of the last straws in my old area was a guy who got shot in the parking lot next to mine, with the gunman on the loose. Came home to cops completely swarming the area. Technically not a murder though!
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Oh yeah, I guess I spent too much time looking up crime data and missed Lester making a recovery. Glad to hear the kid survived and that the collapsed society this old man lives in hasn't had a murder this year!
I'll let you get back to inventing insults and not addressing my central argument.
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