Santara is being way way nicer than I would be at such a biased claim


something no one has considered is the three strikes laws that quite a few states started in the early 90's , there could just be more potential murderers off the streets at any one time? (yeah rose colored glasses)
my other answer was maybe human beings were just evolving into better people and learning to resolve matters without killing each other as often....yeah herp a derp

Strange, I've read the book and one of the central arguments was that crime rates fell by age group as expected if legalized abortion was the cause, yet this article says it wasn't handled and they only used aggregate statistics. There's other stuff in the article setting off my bullshit detector that was clearly handled in the book as well.... but who knows, maybe it's better explained by crack cocaine. But my primary point was that crime rates have been dropping for a long time now and this isn't news.



@ Bold - and maybe fairies mutated our DNA so we can all live in a friendly happy world and drugs are no longer addicting. That's about as provable as "people were just.... EVOLVING into better people!"

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Nov 12 2014 08:07am

thats why I herp a derped myself silly,

my first idea is the only one I can logically come up with and that is we are keeping more dangerous people off of the streets, and with the 3 strike policy they do think about that third felony a bit more before committing it?

I'm not exactly an economics expert but they said increased policing had been taken into account

I was just throwing up a random chart off of google. I'm no proponent of gun control. It is nice seeing Chicago not being as Chiraq as it used to be.

I like guns. I have friends with actual assault rifles and they sure are fun to shoot. My buddy has some nice stuff...much better than the M4 carbines we got in the army...

And I agree, AR-15s are kids toys for grown men who want to play GI Joe and pretend they had the balls to be a soldier fighting for something somewhere....real combatants use other weapons for any given purpose. I suppose if you want to fire a bunch of low caliber rounds very fast for a couple minutes until a jam occurs and then have to SPORTS for your life then the M16 models are okay. I had one jam on me when I needed it and then I realized why the other guys were using assault rifles that were fifty years old but designed right to begin with.

I guess I'm not as fan of the AR-15 because I used the unwatered down version of them and those even kind of sucked. I'll take an Heckler & Koch or an Automat Kalashnikov anyday.

And yeah, people who own AR-15s aren't using them for anything. Maybe putting a bunch of overpriced attachments on the gun that makes them look more like a tool. If I see another $900 LED red laser pointer attachment at a gun show I'm going to puke. Just learn to shoot the fucking thing lol. Yep, they're definitely not doing anything that takes balls, like committing felonies.



I don't think self-defense is murder. Homicide for sure, but murder is illegal, self-defense isn't....qualitative difference there.

This post was edited by Skinned on Nov 12 2014 10:15am

This story is about scholarly refutation of the premise, not simply rhetorical refutation we typically engage here in PaRD. Dropping for a long time isn't news, but trumpeting legal abortion as the cause for it must be met head on, imho, for no other reason than to deny any attempt at assigning a moral position to abortion.

I don't think it is a moral position assigned to abortion. There are no moral phenomena, just moral interpretations of phenomena. I think the article was more descriptive than anything, it didn't seem to be moralistic at all (people ought to have abortions, because it lowers crime). Such an argument would be so incredibly racist as well I think it would be shot down brutally in our marketplace of ideas we call democracy.

US violent crime is understated by a significant margine due to the US' narrow definition of what violent crime is. It helps with keeping property values up, but doesn't give us an accurate assessment; at face value, of violent crime in the US. We know there is a positive correlation in many states (but not all, Vermont for example) between firearms proliferation and crime. Is there causation? Perhaps not, but there is a stronger argument made against rising ownership rates of firearms causing a negative correlation with violent crime.

This post was edited by Caedus on Nov 12 2014 10:21am

Hence my use of the word "assigning." It's not as if PaRD doesn't have/had people that advocate abortion availability on moral grounds (Tric, Inky).



No, there is not. John Lott has already done the heavy lifting on that one.

This post was edited by Santara on Nov 12 2014 10:24am

Yes there is. Why does a firearm prevent crime? That's a question that has never been answered to a satisfactory level. Most states with high levels of firearms proliferation have high levels of crime. Counter examples of places with high crime and low guns tend to be non-representative samples such as Chicago. Crime is also correlated with poor socio-economic status and lower levels of education, but that's a contributing factor to crime not an alternative reason.

I have not yet found a study with a convincing argument that more guns = less crime. The rationale behind the argument is inherently flawed, and the relationship is weak at best, further broken down by the fact it's not a model that can be generalized. Using guns as the only factor to determine violent crime is wrongheaded, but ignoring it is as well.

I ask again, why do firearms prevents crime?

E: Lott is an dissenter who's opinions are rejected by the vast majority of academics within applied politics. You can cite Lott, and the person arguing against you can cite ten other studies that reject Lott's findings. Lott's research is also funded by people who support gun rights and not neutral, academic sources, so we have reasonable grounds to doubt the neutrality of his findings.

This post was edited by Caedus on Nov 12 2014 10:36am