George Zimmerman Explodes the NRA Fantasy of the Armed Citizen

[The Straight Story]

36. Hmmm on the decline in crime, from their own link:

Since the 1990s, however, crime in the United States has declined steeply. Several theories have been proposed to explain this decline:

The number of police officers increased considerably in the 1990s.

The prison population has been expanded since the mid-1970s.

Starting in the mid-1980s, the crack cocaine market grew rapidly before declining again a decade later. Some authors have pointed towards the link between violent crimes and crack use.

One hypothesis suggests a causal link between legalized abortion and the drop in crime during the 1990s.

Changing demographics of an aging population has been cited for the drop in overall crime.

Another hypothesis suggests reduced lead exposure as the cause; Scholar Mark A.R. Kleiman writes: "Given the decrease in lead exposure among children since the 1980s and the estimated effects of lead on crime, reduced lead exposure could easily explain a very large proportion—certainly more than half—of the crime decrease of the 1994-2004 period. A careful statistical study relating local changes in lead exposure to local crime rates estimates the fraction of the crime decline due to lead reduction as greater than 90 percent.

Three Strikes You're Out Laws were suggested during the 1992 election cycle and implemented immediately following.

-----

Did I miss the part about it being attributed to guns? Do guns CAUSE crime, or are there other factors (like, I dunno, People?)

From the other link they provided:

Still, unit gun sales seem to have gone up pretty explosively between 2005-10, doubling from around 5 million per year to 10 million per year. FBI background checks, a proxy for gun sales to individuals, have gone up too.

So I'm not sure what's going on. Gun sales to individuals seem like they've increased a fair amount over the past decade, but the number of households reporting gun ownership has decreased a bit.