Kidnapping is not a common crime here, but armed robbery is. Most Americans who come over are surprised by how fortress-like most of middle-class suburbia is. Everyone has high walls. Many have electric fencing and/or razor wire. It's three parts risk-mitigation and one part pure paranoia, some of it racially informed, since suburbia is still predominantly white, despite a growing black middle class.
The subculture of whites Pistorius came from is deeply paranoid, as reflected in some of his father's outrageous statements after the killing. While he was allegedly never very close to his father, there seems little doubt he grew up in an environment steeped in racially-charged paranoia and weapon-worship. So beyond legitimate security concerns, I think Pistorius was a little more paranoid and weapon crazy than most (the latter is attested to from his own mouth in interviews before the killing - the guy had an arsenal). Its also a very, very macho culture with unreformed attitudes to gender power relationships. The incidence of family murders is unusually high among white, Afrikaans-speaking men. I hasten to add that I don't want to broad-brush Afrikaners here, just paint a picture of a large subculture within Afrikanerdom.
What's emerged from many accounts of people close to him and people close to Reeva after the killing is that he was also a very, very jealous and controlling person when it came to relationships. And apparently Reeva had been in furtive text message exchanges with a former boyfriend who she was still friends with before the crime and her relationship with Pistorius was going through a rocky patch. I'm not going to pre-judge him though. Its as likely that the kind of shoot-first, ask-questions-later mentality of someone paranoid about violent crime was to blame as it is that he was just insanely jealous and murdered her in cold blood (possibly because, as one theory has it, she was furtively talking to an ex-boyfriend in the bathroom while she thought he was sleeping).
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