A City of One's Own: Blurring the Boundaries Between Private and Public by Sophie Body-Gendrot & Jacques Carré

Author:Sophie Body-Gendrot & Jacques Carré [Body-Gendrot, Sophie & Carré, Jacques]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Regional Planning, Public Policy, Political Science
ISBN: 9781351962711
Google: d1GoDQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 33346068
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2008-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

The participation of American citizens in fighting crime is not merely symbolic. Its reality can be found in numbers. According to the statistics published in the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, 4,749 of the 11,440 'felons killed during the commission of a felony' between 1987 and 2004 were killed by private citizens, and not by the police – that is to say four out of ten.

Voices clamouring for the rights of individuals to be armed when threatened, at the workplace or elsewhere, are often heard in the United States, from the already-mentioned, post-9/11 voices of airline pilots to those of Texan judges after courtroom attacks,2 or from those of rampage victims such as Texas State representative Suzanna Gratia Hupp3 following the deaths of her parents killed in Killeen in 1991 to the collective voice of the National Rifle Association advocating the arming of teachers to prevent school shootings.4 This, again, stands in sharp contrast with France. Even if French society is usually considered as less violent, it has known, over the years, its share of tragedies. Tellingly, the use of force by individual citizens has never been considered, at least in the public debate, as an appropriate response. After the rape of a railroad employee in 2005, for example, the unions called not for the right to use more force, but for better security in their trains by increasing the workforce.5 Similarly, doctors in down-ridden districts and confronted by racketeering, asked simply, passively, for police protection.6 Even a decision by the government to mobilize retired policemen and military personnel to act as security guards after an attack on a court clerk in Rouen was sharply criticized by the magistrates' unions.7 Maintaining security in courthouses, or elsewhere it seems, is seen, in France, as the task of the police. The country has experienced rampages just as tragic and as dramatic as any American state – in Tours, for instance, a madman killed four people in the street in 2001 while in Nanterre, another killed eight city council members during a meeting in 2002 – but there is not a single organization in the country, not even one single sportive shooting association, that supports the cause of victims being armed.8 This extreme difference in sensibility is possibly best epitomized by the French-American controversy which broke out when American authorities required the presence of armed security agents on foreign carriers entering or leaving the United States, while French airline pilots were strongly opposed.9

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