How they deal with "Happy Slapping" in the USA!

We received quite an unusual email response to a recent article "Businesses want resort yob crackdown", following the negative effect of thug behaviour on small businesses in coastal towns.

The original report highlighted the launch of a campaign earlier this year calling on police forces covering coastal towns to use dispersal orders this season to control anti social behaviour after they were used successfully in Bournemouth last year.

A reader from Phoenix, Arizona illustrated quite vividly how the Americans would deal with such a problem... not quite the usual response to articles on Bytestart, but a good read all the same!

<start>I was reading in a U.S. newspaper about the "yob problem", more precisely "happy slapping" in the U.K. In the U.S.A. (32 states I believe, and growing) we have what are known as Concealed Carry Permits that allow any adult that can pass a extensive backround investigation by local and federal law enforcement (meaning of course no criminal record), to carry a concealed weapon. I prefer a semi-automatic sidearm chambered in .45 ACP.

The idea is that any "yob" intent on abusing a stranger may well find himself looking down the business end of a gun barrel. Should they be of such low intelligence to move agressively in spite of this, you get one less "yob". This may seem like uncivilized Americanism in the U.K.

I offer you a quote from the famous gun maker Samuel Colt: " An armed society, is a polite society".<end>