Yes, lead poisoning could really be a cause of violent crime

[jmowreader]

118. It may be "trace" quantities of lead that are responsible

I'll explain this in a second...but they should look at the violent crime stats in areas that had a lot of cars, lead pipes and so on (think NYC, Chicago, Detroit and other major cities), then compare them to areas that had far fewer cars (rural areas in the Midwest farm belt like Kansas and Minnesota would work) and to areas that had lead-production facilities.

For about a hundred years, the Bunker Hill Mining Corporation ran the biggest lead smelter in the United States - when they built it, it was the world's largest smelter - in Kellogg, Idaho. In the 1930s and 1940s, when the smokestacks were only about 100 feet high and didn't have scrubbers on them, there was an unbelievable amount of lead in the environment of the Silver Valley. An example: there is a little stream maybe twenty feet wide running through Kellogg. In the 1920s to the mid-1970s that stream was GRAY from all the lead in it. The locals called it Lead Creek. It was even on the maps: Lead Creek. Absolutely no one, including the town governments, knew Lead Creek was actually the North Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River. You couldn't have grass up there. My Granny Pucci had the only lawn in Kellogg. It was (this is no exaggeration, folks) three feet square, and she cut it on her hands and knees - kneeling outside the grassy area because putting pressure on the lawn would kill it - with a pair of kitchen shears. You couldn't have a pet up there because if it got outside and drank from a mud puddle it would be dead by morning. There wasn't a lot of violent crime in the Silver Valley; there is now that the lead levels are lower, but high levels of lead will mellow your ass out. They will also make you lethargic and cut down on the intellect. My school played sports against three schools in the Silver Valley (specifically, Kellogg, Wallace and Mullan) and...if you watch Deliverance you can get a fair idea of how a lot of the people up there were.