Is the goal reasonable gun control laws, or is the goal saving lives?

[krispos42]

28. Bullshit.

The NYC crime rate began to plunge at the same time the other urban centers, as well as the overall crime rates, plunged. Starting in about 1990. In about 1994, federal funding put about 50,000 more cops on the streel, and NYC Mayor Dinkins (spelling?) had put in a major program to expand the NYPD, which came to fruition under Mayor Nine Eleven.



Our common liberal values caused the crime rate to plunge nationwide. Not gun-control laws, but environmental and woman's-rights laws.

In the early 70's, fuel-efficiency standards and automotive pollution limits went into effect; catalytic converters became standard equipment. Because of the converters, leaded gas became obsolescent almost immediately. The US switched over to unleaded gasoline, and within a short period of time the air being breathed by children and pregnant women was pretty much free of lead.






Lead, as you know, causes brain damage that increases anti-social behavior and a laundry-list of other developmental problems.

Also that the same time, abortion was legalized, and only a few years before hormonal birth control had become widespread. Women could now control when then gave birth, resulting in fewer instances of children being born into situations where they were more likely to become violent criminals.

So, with birth control widespread and airborne lead sharply diminished, the generation born in the early-to-mid 70's (my generation) came to about age 15 (15 to 24 are the prime violence-crime-committing years of a criminal's life) with much less of a tendency to be violent criminals.

And the crime rate plunged in half in a decade.





The opposite is true as well. In the post-WW2 era, the population exploded, as did the highway system and the number of cars on the road. Kids born in from, say '47 to '60, were breathing in lots of lead as the American car culture spread in lockstep with the expansion of the middle class and suburbia. 15 years later, say '62 to '75, you can see the violent crime rate start to climb. It more than doubled, actually, as the Baby Boomers hit adulthood.


None of this had to do with guns or magazines or protruding pistol grips or anything... it had to do in huge part with the tendency of the most violent-prone segment of the population (people age 15-24) to commit violence.


Now, of course there were other things that affect the rate as well... the War on Drugs, Prohibition, the economy, but again, none of that happens to do with hardware or Mayor Bloomberg, the Wall Street mayor.