I think you're generalizing too much. Rural communities take gun safety seriously. Farming communities take farming equipment seriously. Kids grow up internalizing the seriousness of these things, which is communicated expressly and tacitly their whole lives by countless people around them, including their friends. Plus they encounter walking examples of what can go wrong, like a missing finger, burn scars (not careful around bonfires or burn pits), or bullet holes (I knew at least 2 or 3 kids growing up with scars from shot). But put those same kids or adults who are careful with those machines in a similarly dangerous but novel situation, and they'll do dumb shit like anyone else. I'm tempted to argue they're more likely to do something dumb because they have a false confidence from their experience with other dangerous situations, whereas suburban and city kids may be more likely to be too scared to play around with any dangerous machine or situation.
I lived on a farm for a year as a young kid (farmer rented a couple of trailers on his land). I remember one day I was hanging around the hog pen watching the giant hogs mill about, probably contemplating trying to pet one. Mr Austin came by and sternly told me to not to reach through the fencing, then knelt down and showed me his ear, which was missing a big chunk.
On the flip side, plenty of Rural and Suburban people are terrified by the city, which kids growing up in the city shrug off.
Rural folks might learn to respect a PTO or the varmint rifle by age 10, but city kids learn how to navigate the bus routes and subway. They learn how to walk on crowded streets, how to live among a lot of different people, including dangerous people(and how to avoid the conflict).
It's all quite interesting. Different kinds of toughness, different kinds of mental fortitude.
I think that there's a major difference in the resulting mindsets that the two types of experiences form, though.
The first learn that nature is always present and doing its best to kill you / wreck your harvest, and that it is only through man's intelligence and social bonds that we thrive. I would argue a corollary of this is that one cannot tolerate malicious or grossly neglectful people around.
The second group learns that other people are a liability and that bad actors are just a fact of life to be tolerated and worked around.
Both approaches are clearly optimal for their respective environment. The former seems like a stronger foundation for building a civilization on, though.
This is becoming such a weird romanticisation of rural Americana!
Your civilisation is being destroyed because a largely rural constituency is able to clean a rifle in 60s but appears to have no critical thinking skills when it comes to a certain New Yorker.
Yes it’s good to learn how to be resilient in nature, but it’s also important to learn how to get along with and manage relationships with larger groups who are not always to be trusted.
The point missing from this discussion is that because of hysteria over stranger danger (not supported out by any real evaluation of or changes in risk) and because we allow cars to dominate our urban spaces, city kids are being denied opportunities for independence they previously had. That’s the real change that’s happened … and we’re replacing real urban experience with corporate attention economies.
City kids can get on the bus or urban rail in actual big cities. Even in places like urban philippines or mexico where there is [often] no public transport, collectivos take up this niche. Kids abound in these places even in places like Manila where traffic is way worse and way more homicidal, and they take the jeepnee to go to the next barangay.
It's really mainly in the suburbs where neighborhoods are choked off by bike unfriendly freeways and no for-hire transit.