Hacker News Reader

Comment by beerandt | Hacker News Reader

The problem isn't that we need better locks, but that we need locks at all.

Within my lifetime we've gone from leaving the backdoor unlocked at night and leaving the car keys on the seat (or in the ignition) from being the normal practice to being unthinkable.

You're focusing on the wrong govt policies.

View on HN

Please, nobody ever left their doors unlocked all the time, if trust was _really_ that high there wouldn't have been locks at all.

We did when I was a kid. Nobody locked their doors in my town. In fact multiple people just had blanks over the holes meant for deadbolts.

Then the local powerplant shut down, and the manufacturing associated with it left as well. The largest employer in the area besides those two moved operations to China. Then methamphetamine became popular and then heroin, too.

Now you can't leave anything unlocked or outside.

> We did when I was a kid. Nobody locked their doors in my town. In fact multiple people just had blanks over the holes meant for deadbolts.

Yeah, because you guys had a warped perception of crime.

Virtually all crime now is significantly lower than it was just 20 years ago. You might not believe that, but it's true!

What's happening here is people's perceptions are being warped, almost certainly due to political propaganda. But the numbers don't lie, just take a look at the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

I hear you, and nationally that is probably true. But locally it's just not. There genuinely wasn't crime here outside of drunk fights once a year at the local pool hall.

Now there is genuine crime. Drugs and murder.

I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying that your argument doesn't apply on the local scale. Using macro data for micro experience is a bad idea.

This is also the reason that argument falls flat in a lot of places.

I'm sorry you never got the chance to live in a high-trust area.

A lot harder to find one now.

For the majority of my childhood and teenage years the door was never locked. I don’t think it’s a British thing to leave your keys on the seat, but they were always in the hallway, right next to the unlocked door (like everyone else I knew).

I’m trying to think of the point this changed, and I can’t, but I would guess around 2008-2010 or so.

Yikes. This is more of an incredible claim than the counter. I'm shocked that you are willing to make it so confidently.

We did when I was a kid and my uncle still does. It’s sad that it’s hard for you to fathom safe communities.

For sure we did. Our backdoor, and that of all the neighbours was unlocked day and night. Same for my grandmothers' house and her neighbours. 1970s.

Or to put it another way:

Social problems and regressions cannot be resolved with ever more esoteric technological or draconian political solutions.

Maybe that's the goal. By creating the Kia Boyz situation, through omission of proven controls used in other countries, we created a nice conduit for more draconian measures.

There are political solutions

Reply on news.ycombinator.com