Let’s forget all the idiots, including the NRA, who are out there with guns, who are shooting and killing, no, let’s not remember them. Or the people they kill, or who are killed with their weapons. In my neighborhood a month or so ago an infant shot and killed itself with his Daddy’s pistol. Daddy is a cop. But that probably won’t show up.

Dick Cheney shot a fellow full in the face with a shotgun. No crime though, won’t show up on statistics, wasn’t even interviewed by cops until much, much later. What the hell, accidents happen, and they aren’t crimes.

Rudy Guliani managed to have the crime rate in NY go down simply by chastizing those who reported them. It’simple.

“Statutes carrying mandatory minimum penalties have increased in number, apply to more offense conduct, require longer terms, and are used more often than they were 20 years ago. These changes have occurred amid other systemic changes to the federal criminal justice system, including expanded federalization of criminal law, increased size and changes in the composition of the federal criminal docket, high rates of imposition of sentences of imprisonment, and increasing average sentence lengths. The changes to mandatory minimum penalties and these co-occurring systemic changes have combined to increase the federal prison population significantly.”

Source: “Report to Congress: Mandatory Minimum Penalties in the Federal Criminal Justice System” (Washington, DC: US Sentencing Commission, October 2011), p. 83.

All I see is that crime was high for years, dropped drastically in the 60s, went up drastically, and is now going down again.

It’s pretty hard to fit that hundred-year sine curve into any favorite theories, Left or Right. And “sociologists” aren’t much help since most of them are about favorite theories, too. There are just too damn many attractive variables that fit the curves, if you’re not picky about your start dates.

I have another theory, too. I don’t believe people commit crimes because they are poor and need to eat. Food is cheap. People commit more rcrimes because they live in a society where there is a greater disparity of wealth, and people want their share. The poor don’t steal to buy bread, they steal to buy designer tennis shoes, bling and big stereos and flashy wheels for their cars. White collar criminals are similarly driven, but their bling is different.

Drugs are also a major driving factor. If drugs were cheap crime would go down, Addicts could get their fix without stealing, and pushers would find dealing less profitable. Until all the factors are identified, their effects and interactions properly weighted, and comprehensive sociometric models developed and tested, we probably won’t know for sure.

This is why we need sociologists, and they need to be trained to do the research and the analysis, not justify their pet ideological preconceptions.

PS: Leaded gas may have been introduced in the 20s, but automobile ownership didn’t really take off until the 50s.

They started using lead in gas in the 1920s.

…then again, it might be that the percentage of white people is declining. Perhaps blacks and latinos tend to commit less crimes than anglo-saxons do. At any rate, that’s what my mother used to say.

Here’s a longer trend chart for violence in general. (Gun violence alone follows similar trends):

What’s interesting is that if you look at curves for other Western nations, the heights of the curves vary, but the general shape, with peaks in the early 90s and declines thereafter, are similar. This implies something beyond the knee-jerk explanations.

ADDED: Another long-trend chart for homicides: