By contrast, America’s lonely, atomized upper-middle-class white suburbs were not homicidal. Their highly mobile occupants were not much involved with each other. They didn’t depend on one another to survive. The occasional condominium board meeting might get ugly, but mostly there was enough law in such places—enough expectation of a legal response to violence—to keep the occasional neighbor dispute from getting out of hand. And if there wasn’t—for example, if a young man grew tired of his brawling high school chums—moving somewhere else was easy enough.
