And it's self-reinforcing. I live in a rural county the size of Connecticut with just 5k people in it. The people that choose to live out here are frequently the ones who particularly value that extra freedom ... including law enforcement. It is almost routine here for the local sheriff to announce that will not enforce some local or federal code or another. Talk to a deputy about crime and he'll ask if you have guns, and then recommend that you buy one if you don't.

The county government does little and our property taxes reflect that.

I can and have burned very large piles in my yard, but we're not savages. I have to notify the local volunteer fire department first, or they're libel to show up, and not happily.

Odd, I live in a rural area as well. When I cross the state line into the new york state back country, I literally see garbage piles in some people's front yards. Like they don't wanna pay for garbage collection, so it piles up in their yard for months until they burn it all. The fire dept are all volunteers and don't just randomly show up to a fire unless someone calls it in. We burn wood in the yard for leisure or to get rid of brush, but im more of a get garbage to its place kind of guy.

We have no garbage pickup in the county, we haul it to one of four collection areas. Those cost $140/year plus about $7/100lbs, so no doubt some more thrifty neighbors are burning household trash instead, but I just burn slash and take household trash to the dumpsters.

There's a high fire risk in this area and smoke watchers will report it, and the VFD gets dispatched. They don't respond individually.

I don’t have a particular rural vs. urban point to make, only a general observation about law and freedom: a place where law enforcement feels empowered to ignore the law is a place where law enforcement is effectively the sole power. In effect, a dictator’s prescribed freedom.

> a place where law enforcement feels empowered to ignore the law is a place where law enforcement is effectively the sole power

Like New York? The above commenter said law enforcement advised them to get guns which is what I've experienced growing up rural; tyrannical power mongers who are as you said, the sole power, try to take people's guns away.

Perhaps they were encouraging "the right people" to arm themselves. That can be more effective for a tyrant than disarming everyone equally.

This equivocation doesn’t make sense: New York has so far respected federal court rulings that repeal its attempts at gun control. You can complain about their attempts, but it seems incorrect to use legislative failures as evidence of selective enforcement.

I agree. Rule of law is critical and requires consistency. But given the choice I'd rather live in a jurisdiction where law enforcement tends to use their discretion in favor of less rather than more centralized control. That bias towards less control seems to be inversely correlated with population density.

We spent 25 years out in the rural West, though we preferred to live in a town.

We left because over the last 15 years the decay of uniform public law enforcement has essentially led to "norms" being enforced by the local landowning elites. And they have certain characteristics that make them highly identifiable. IOW, if you look like them, you get all the space you have said you prefer. If not, well, there's not a lot to limit the potential downsides.

This has also led to a large increase in trash behavior out on the public lands. Lots of new wildcat trails/double track for instance. For us it got pretty uncomfortable a few times in the last 5-6 years. We began to post the shotguns in a highly visible place in the camp, or in the truck. That definitely helped.

I guess that works just as long as according to their discretion that you're "one of the good ones". Folks who are in the out-groups have experienced the tyranny of this "discretion" for generations. Sundown towns didn't disappear as soon as the civil rights act was passed.

"For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law."

https://www.quora.com/Who-originally-said-To-my-friends-ever...

There is a principal difference between "we won't enforce all laws on some people" and "we won't enforce some laws on all people".

>a place where law enforcement feels empowered to ignore the law

In the history of the world, there has never been a law enforcement institution that enforced the rules equally to itself. The same is true of every power structure e.g. governance; financial elites; ...

Or it’s a practical statement on how if you have someone breaking into your house, police may be well over 15+ minutes away if they can rush straight over. Hell, there are quite a few places were response time is going to be measure in hours. Same reason it’s good to have a chainsaw and know how to use it to clear a felled tree on a road, waiting for someone to take care of it for you isn’t always a great plan.

Dictators don’t strike me as generally inclined to recommend having the capacity for self defense. I think you are just trying to come up with the worst possible interpretation of intention.

*liable to show up

it feels to me Americans are more legislated: city laws, county, state, federal. That there are more neighbourly oppressions: your community has more rights against you (about what your lawn looks like, etc.). And so on.

Americans also feel more taxed, again, at every level above.

Ironically, I think the more centralised power is, the more uniformly its managed, the more free one feels under it -- since there arent as many competing interests to worry about

Actually it's funny, my grandfather has been cited numerous times for burning brush on his property recently. Apparently it's always been a law on the books where he lives but the fire department never enforced it