Posted on 10/22/2011 10:01:41 AM PDT by RC one
Health care, climate change, terrorism — is it even possible to solve big problems? The mood in Washington is not very hopeful these days. But take a look at what has happened to one of the biggest, toughest problems facing the country 20 years ago: violent crime. For years, Americans ranked crime at or near the top of their list of urgent issues. Every politician, from alderman to President, was expected to have a crime-fighting agenda, yet many experts despaired of solutions. By 1991, the murder rate in the U.S. reached a near record 9.8 per 100,000 people. Meanwhile, criminologists began to theorize that a looming generation of so-called superpredators would soon make things even worse. (See the top 10 crime stories of 2009.)
Then, a breakthrough. Crime rates started falling. Apart from a few bumps and plateaus, they continued to drop through boom times and recessions, through peace and war, under Democrats and Republicans. Last year's murder rate may be the lowest since the mid-1960s, according to preliminary statistics released by the Department of Justice. The human dimension of this turnaround is extraordinary: had the rate remained unchanged, an additional 170,000 Americans would have been murdered in the years since 1992. That's more U.S. lives than were lost in combat in World War I, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq — combined. In a single year, 2008, lower crime rates meant 40,000 fewer rapes, 380,000 fewer robberies, half a million fewer aggravated assaults and 1.6 million fewer burglaries than we would have seen if rates had remained at peak levels. There's a catch, though. No one can convincingly explain exactly how the crime problem was solved. Police chiefs around the country credit improved police work. Demographers cite changing demographics of an aging population.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
Sorry for the triple post-Blackberry issues.
CSI, and many, many other cop shows on TV - Everyone, even the poorest of the “poor” in this country have TVs. People see these cop shows and get the idea that they can’t get away with anything nowadays. I know, the shows are fake, and you can’t possibly expect that cops can actually do what they do on TV, but it sure looks real.
“Add to that cell phones and cell phones with cameras. Chances of being seen and reported and recorded in the act, have gone up substantially.”
Excellent point! Maybe I’ll finally get me one.
Yep, gun owners were second only to smokers as the scum of the earth.
You do what you have to do friend and I will do what I have to do. There is nothing there that says I will kill you. Only that I practice the 2d amendment. Signs stay where they are.
This reminds me of the classic Iowahawk satire “The Heart of Redness”:
DAY ONE: BASE CAMP, IOWA CITY
Mission: bring back Von Drehle.
The words echo in my mind as I peer out the frost-framed window of ‘Pretense,’ a moderately priced new-American bistro on the edge of campus. My eyes follow clusters of students, shoulders hunched against the cold, criss-crossing the snowy Pentacrest like the exasperating strokes of a de Koonig canvas.
We all have a mission, I thought. For those faceless students: diversity seminars, Nam Jun Paik film retrospectives at the Union, maybe Dollar Pitcher Nite at the Airliner. For me: Von Drehle.
It - or rather, he - is the mission that has brought me to this dismal and lonely outpost on the edge of reason. Tomorrow I will make the dangerous trek north on Dubuque Street to Exit 242, merge into the river of semi-trailers on Interstate 80, and head west into the great red unknown between here and Boulder.
It is the same route Von Drehle followed before he went missing: I-80 to Nebraska, then south on highway 77 through Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. Ironically the Post had sent Von Drehle on his own mysterious mission - to learn why the natives were suddenly agitating against Post subscription offers. He went missing on January 11, emailing his final story draft with a cryptic personal note: “the horror... the horror.”
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2005/01/heart_of_rednes.html
12 wounded in Friday afternoon, Saturday morning shootings
That’s pretty hard to believe considering all the anti-gun legislation in Illinois and Chicago.
Law abiding citizens with guns!
Actually the first of the boomers turned 65 this year, there aren’t that many boomers breaking hips and entering dementia just yet. They aren’t even really too old to break and enter, they just have better things to do. I was born two years prior to the start of the baby boom and I am quite fit enough to break and enter a half dozen places a day if that were the only thing to stop me. I can still swing a nine pound splitting maul and that will break into a lot of buildings.
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