New Yorker magazine has an interesting article about history of 2nd amendment, NRA and gun control

[Atypical Liberal]

57. I don't carry.

So you are perfectly happy feeling that you "must carry" in order to feel protected?

I don't know about "protected", but I feel pretty "safe" where I live and travel on a regular basis, and I don't carry a firearm.

Do you think that "must issue" and "concealed carry" have actually led to the decline? Perhaps something else is at work in respect of those declining numbers - a rising standard of living(despite our economic downturn) - better policing, town watch, etc.

No, there is no evidence to say that more liberal firearm laws have caused the decrease in crime. All we can say is that they probably have not increased crime, given the huge numbers of firearms going into circulation.

The biggest reason why crime has declined since the 1990s is we have put an entire child-bearing-age set of African-Americans and Hispanics in prison. Aside from the unfair prison and sentencing that African-Americans and other minorities get, this has had the effect of putting a huge swath of disenfranchised people who might easily find criminal activity a way out of poverty into prison.

I've cynically heard it put (and I disagree with this) "the right people are now in jail." There is nothing right about incarcerating African-Americans at the absurd rates they are incarcerated at, especially when you consider the social problems that give minorities such a hopeless outlook on life that a life of crime looks like a way up. But when you look at homicides in New York City, you can easily tell that most homicide is committed by African-Americans.

http://projects.nytimes.com/crime/homicides/map

As you can see from the map, 61% of homicides are committed by African-Americans, and 29% are committed by Hispanics, for a total of 90%. Unfair or not, if 30 years ago you started putting huge chunks of the child-bearing minority population in prison you are going to see a reduction in crime over time. And that is just what has happened.

The war on drugs has put a large chunk of our most disenfranchised members of society in prison, which is just what Nixon intended when he started it. My google is failing me right now, but I distinctly remember a quote by Richard Nixon where he basically said, "The problem really is the blacks. The trick is to create a policy that addresses this without appearing to."

Rather than fix the social problems that make crime look like an opportunity for those with little other opportunity, we put them in jail. A rather hollow victory.

As an aside, of course this opens up a whole other social consequence. The right loves to rail against unwed and single mothers and yet with the prosecution of the drug war we have put large swaths of the available men for minority women in prison. (Not that I'm against inter-racial marriage, which I think is fine, it's just not yet the norm).

You will most like likely say that a society where everyone is armed is a "civil" society. If that was indeed the case, then Afghanistan or Somalia should be remarkably civil and safe.

The difference is law and order. In a lawful and orderly society, where people have faith in the government and the rules, then most people operate inside the law to resolve personal and professional conflicts. When people have faith in the justice system, the courts become the arbiters of such conflicts. Thus law-abiding people can be armed in such societies and they will seldom use their firearms outside of the law.

When there is no law and order, and society is in chaos and the government is corrupt or non-existant, and people feel that they will get no protection nor representation from their government, and they will have no recourse within the law for injustice, then they will operate outside the law to get justice.

That said, if you lived in Afghanistan or Somalia, would you want to be defenseless?

Being able to defend yourself and your family is largely a luxury here in the United States. There I would think it would be an absolute necessity.