Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Why is Crime Dropping?



The BBC reports on ten possible explanations. Somehow they didn't even mention more guns equals less crime. Here's my favorite.

There is a controversial theory put forward by economist Steven Levitt that the increased availability of legal abortion after the Supreme Court ruling in 1973 on Roe v Wade meant that fewer children were born to young, poor, single mothers. This, says the theory, stopped unwanted babies in the 1970s and 80s from becoming adolescent criminals in the decades that followed. But some of his peers have questioned whether the evidence really supports the theory.

What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.

7 comments:

  1. MikeB: “Somehow they didn't even mention more guns equals less crime.”

    Somehow they didn’t mention gun control either, and that is from British media. Are you calling that a win?

    Funny that you did quote Steven Levitt, who had this to say about your favorite topic:

    We wrote a good bit about guns in Freakonomics — primarily about the lack of efficacy of gun-control laws and gun buybacks on the crime rate

    http://www.freakonomics.com/2007/09/10/guns-in-america/

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  2. I caught that they didn't even mention more guns equals less crime as well.

    TS, the US DOESN'T have any significant gun control, just look at how easy it is for a disqualified person to acquire a firearm.

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  3. I don't subscribe to the More Guns, Less Crime theory on a nationwide scale. Sure it works at the local level as areas with more gun ownership and CCW, the less risk criminals are willing to take. But as a nationwide application I do not believe it has an impact at all. Why would an Atlanta "Urban Thug" care if Arizona changed their permit requirement? How would Castle Doctrine in Pennsylvania make a Chicago sheep any safer from local predators?

    I do not believe that crime is even going down but instead is on the rise. Politicians like data to reflect lower crime so that the sheep feel like they are being protected and that their inane social policies actually do anything.

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  4. Laci: “the US DOESN'T have any significant gun control, just look at how easy it is for a disqualified person to acquire a firearm.”

    I agree with Laci. All they have managed to do is burden and sometimes criminalize the innocent.

    I agree with Fat White Man that gun proliferation has not had any effect on national crime rates (good or bad). Good laws have allowed many individuals to successfully protect themselves, but being able to measure and attribute a national trend of decreasing crime to it- I don’t buy it.

    I disagree with Fat White Man that crime is actually increasing.

    So that’s 100% agreement with Laci the Dog, and splitting 50/50 with Fat White Man. Weird day.

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  5. Correlation does not equal Causation. Always tough not to project one onto the other (depending on one's viewpoint).

    US Education scores have also gone up as crime has gone down. An educated population tends to reduce criminal activity.

    Illegal immigration is also way down. You might consider it racist but many illegals commit crimes.

    Numbers of those incarcerated has also steadily gone up. The US has gotten better about locking up repeat offenders before they can graduate to more violent crime.

    Seems little to do with guns and more to do with other variables.

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  6. Crime's going up or crime's going down, who cares. If it's going down, with proper gun control it would go down more. If it's going up, it would go up less or not at all with proper gun control, which as Laci rightly said, has never been tried in the US.

    Here's the point. What FWM said is only part of the story. "with more gun ownership and CCW, the less risk criminals are willing to take."

    The other part is "with more gun ownership and CCW," the more so-called lawful gun owners and CCW guys commit crimes, have negligent discharges and have their weapons stolen.

    Guns do more harm than good. That's the point.

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  7. Let's reprise those John Lott "stats", one more time!

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