Welcome and unwelcome things at once

Such welcome and unwelcome things at once

'Tis hard to reconcile.

Shakespeare, Macbeth: Act IV sc.iii

Some Americans I've spoken to have expressed amazement when I've told them how safe I feel wandering Australian city streets at night; when I say that I can walk just about anywhere in downtown Sydney 99% sure that no-one else in the street is armed with a gun.

A police officer I met at a party here in the Valley told me that he is always armed - "I'm carrying now". I told him Australia has quite a different gun culture. He knew that, he said, almost wistfully, but he's seen too much. I know Australia has bikie shootouts and there's been an increase in violence with the growing amphetamine trade. But I get a sense here, in the US, that even the small-time criminals might be armed and I have a theory that Australian petty crims tend not to be, because even they don't want to raise the stakes.

On the other hand, you see some paradoxes here. The coppers standing by the roadblock at the end of a suburban street in Reseda were quite happy to casually tell me what they were doing as the chopper choppered overhead; a security guard in a baking carpark laughed and patted me on the shoulder when I told him he had the right idea, carrying an umbrella to guard against the sun (a gunman with a parasol). I saw a very grumpy woman at the end of her tether in a laundromat not only laugh when the owner came over and helped her, but rub him on the back!
  
This is a country where one state has recently backed the idea of teachers bringing guns into class:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/09/us/south-dakota-gun-law-classrooms.html?_r=0

But there's incredible courtesy and even affection between strangers here, of a sweetness and poignancy you don't get in Oz, and I wonder if that's the compensating factor.