Posted on 12/25/2011 7:34:30 AM PST by rellimpank
The 1950s are often recalled as a golden age in American life — stable families, rising incomes, wholesome TV shows and low crime rates. Doesn't sound like 2011, does it? When it comes to crime, though, there is a striking similarity: We are, believe it or not, in a new golden age.
Crime has never subsided as a topic for local news or prime-time detective shows. Anyone looking for reasons to fear going out of the house can find plenty. But the truth is our streets are safer than they have been in a long time.
The latest evidence came last week, when the FBI reported that in the first half of 2011, "violent crimes were down 6.4 percent, while property crimes fell 3.7 percent." Murder declined by 5.7 percent, rape by 5.1 percent, and robbery by 7.7 percent.
Six-month drops don't mean much by themselves. But this one continues an established trend. Crime peaked in 1991 and fell steadily before flattening out somewhat in the mid-2000s. But since 2006, both violent crime and property crime have plunged.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
My guess is it mostly related to the baby boomer generation. When they were teens and twenty year olds, crime peaked, which is also the most likely age people commit violent crimes. They settled down and are now geriatrics, and so the crime rates fell naturally
It's worse than that. The problem is all the corruption that isn't illegal.
Yes, but that's only because folks feel so much safer due to the decrease in crime....gun opponents use the same twisted cause/effect "logic" that the Global Warming folks do - probably related.
Yes indeed. The criminals have no need to cause mayhem in the streets when they can get their homeboy union thugs to elect them to office on phony absentee ballots, after which they can proceed to feed off a ‘stimulus’.
As our civilization disintegrates we must be reassured that civilization (as represented by the 1950s) was not all that great. There is a concerted effort to discredit what Hillary Clinton calls “nostalgia merchants.” William Bennett, although he was writing about 1940, wrote that teachers responded to the question about the problems they faced; “In 1940, teachers identified talking out of turn; chewing gum; making noise; running in the halls; cutting in line; dress code infractions; and littering. When asked the same question in 1990, teachers identified drug abuse; alcohol abuse; pregnancy; suicide; rape; robbery; and assault.” The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, William Bennett,, Simon and Schuster, New York,1994, p. 9 135,000 children bring guns to school, in spite of metal detectors. Yet progressive have not completed their “reforms.”
This raises a very interesting point I haven’t seen elsewhere.
The demographics of birthrates by ethnic group have long been known. There were many abortions before Roe v. Wade, but the number sharply increased after 1973.
But assuming that Roe v. Wade never happened, solely based on known demographic trends, it should be able to approximate, to start with, how many more Americans there would be.
Second, what the ethnic breakdown of these Americans, and the children they probably would have had, would be.
And third, how this would have changed, if at all, the ethnic makeup of America today.
For example, right now about 12% of Americans are black. Without Roe, would that *percentage* be appreciably greater?
****and in the meantime, firearms ownership has increased tremendously****
And yet, guns were more available in the 1950s than now. Every gas station, hardware store, clothing store, book store, and hundreds of other stores sold guns with no paperwork needed.
New guns
old guns
army surplus guns
Saturday night specials,
army rifles from around the world for $5.00 each..
Cash and carry.
Oh for the good old days!
Speaking as someone in the security business, I know this statement to be false.
I suspect that you are right on the money. I grew up in the '50s in Birmingham and one could go to the downtown area at 2:00 in the morning and not worry. Bull Connor's police made sure of that. Today, heck, it would not be safe there at any time of the day. Just like any other metropolitan area, the city's population is controlled by minorities with the concomitant crime and fear.
Like many other trends, this is linked the demographics of the country. As a nation we’re getting older, and violent crime is a young man’s game.
Somehow, reports of “Knockout King” don’t make me feel any safer.
Extreme doubt obtains in *my* mind that the vast majority of them could even spell the word "wholesome" let alone are cogizant of any scintilla of the property...
the infowarrior
Gee... Firearms ownership starts to climb closer to 1950's level and an equivalent drop in violent crime ensues... Whooda thunk it?
the infowarrior
That kind of sounds like the Freakonomics view that abortion reduces crime. I think there are too many variables to say that it does.
http://www.freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-should-you-believe/
What I was asking for is quite objective.
Basically, since Roe v. Wade, how many babies have been aborted, broken down by race? Then, if they had lived to adulthood, if the typical number themselves had children there would be even more people.
Though the majority of aborted babies were white, still the number of aborted black babies was significantly higher than the percentage of the American population that are black.
In turn, this means that there would be many more black Americans than there are right now. Right now, 12% of Americans are black. Were it not for Roe v. Wade, it might be 13, 14, or 15%.
You also neglect how welfare and other things were handled. In the Fifties peopel were smart about who they married and as a result, there were fewer divorces and people knew that they didn’t have welfare to pick them up if they made sserious mistakes. Now we have generations on it and we have kids who use welfare as a foundation on which to build a life of crime. People who used to be able to work and have a life now have ot make work their life in order ot pay for all the illegitimate miscreants that they don’t even have a part in producing.
As for guns, they were easily obtainable because people knew how to control themselves when it came to shooting other people.
Quite right. But the boomers have imported plenty more criminals to make up for their feebleness and they are happily encouraging the production of more through illegitimacy.
Here is a link to a chart that shows how government spending has grown in constant dollars, per capita:
Violent crime also decreases during wars, where we use the violent tendencies of youth to our advantage.
About 15 million abortions were undergone by black women, about 30 million abortions by non-black women from 1973 - 2004 In 2004, the black population was about 36 million and 12 percent out of a population of about 300 million.
If we increase the numbers by the number of abortions performed, then blacks would be at 51 million, non blacks at 294 million, total population at 347 million, assuming that immigration, both legal and illegal remained the same, a dubious assumption.
Given those numbers the percent of black people in the population would be 14.7 percent. If fewer people had immigrated, the percentage would be higher.
Source for the numbers:
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