Poverty and the 2nd Amendment

One can´t live where I do in Brasil without thinking frequently about poverty, and then there were articles in both last sunday´s NY Times and the leading sunday paper in São Paulo which hit on the topic. The NY Times article by Barbara Ehrenreich ("Is it Now a Crime to be Poor?") was obviously about the criminalization of poverty and the one here in São Paulo was about a specific area where homelessness and poverty are associated with the use of crack.

I don´t know the comparative statistics about poverty and homelessness, but I´m willing to believe that it is still a greater problem in Brasil than the US. But for how much longer, given the unemployment (and under-employment) statistics in the US? Whatever the actual numbers and trends might be, one thing is clear. The US does a much better job of keeping the poverty out of the public eye. As the Ehrenreich article makes clear, we hate the necessity of witnessing poverty more than we hate the fact of the poverty itself.

I think that we good people in both countries have created myths about the poor to obviate the need to see real people. They´re drug-addicted. They´re mental cases. They have no ambition.
And, most importantly, they´re not our fault or our problem.

One thing which makes the whole mix more volatile in the US is the addition of guns. It occurred to me the other night, when I was walking in an area where everyone who reads this would be terrified, but where I felt reasonably comfortable (alert, but comfortable), that one big difference is that people in Brasil don´t have weapons.

I know that guns exist in the favelas around Rio, where there seems to be something like a state of war between the drug dealers and the police, but that part of Brasil is totally alien to me. In general, I am assured that people don´t have guns and would find them difficult to buy if they wanted them. Thank goodness.

Because I think Frank Rick is always worth reading:

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/frankrich/index.html