With all the fear mongering lately it's time to remember what the reality of violence and crime truly is. Things are actually really good right now and violent crime has steadily declined for nearly 25 years. Further, we are seeing crime decline while the incarceration rate is declining. Violent crime peaked in 1991 with about 758 violent crimes committed per 100,000 Americans. Since then it has steadily declined to about 376 violent crimes per 100,000. This is the lowest level since the early 70's and a decline of over 50% since 1991. The murder rate has dropped to 4.5 murders per 100,000 people versus the 9.8 murders per 100,000 people in 1991. It peaked in 1980 at a murder rate of 10.2 per 100,000. The murder rate from 1980 to 1991 averaged nearly 8.9 per 100,000 with nearly 255,000 people murdered over that span. So we have seen a decline of nearly 50% in the murder rate from then til now. Texas has been an even bigger improvement with the murder rate declining nearly 74% from the peak in 1980 and violent crime down nearly 52% since the peak in 1991. http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm And here's an article from the dirty liberal Atlantic discussing the decline in crime http://www.theatlantic.com/politics...y-causes-of-americas-decline-in-crime/385364/ I just figured I'd throw this out here since people can tend to obsess over the negative forget about the positive sometimes. We also have a candidate like Trump who keeps telling us there are major threats from outsiders and that our nation is in horrible shape. However, the reality is that things are actually pretty good and they look like they will keep getting better.
Pretty much the world is pretty much richer and safer now that it has ever been, but no one seems to care about numbers: http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-10-23/world-actually-safer-ever-and-heres-data-prove
What we really need to measure is the level of media saturation compared to 1991 (when internet did not exist; cell phone cams did not exist; how many cable channels were there?). Media nowadays literally tie advertisements to videos of people being shot to death. CNN, Fox etc. literally generate money from dashcam videos of real murders. Violence is the most compelling media content. Terror finances trillions of dollars of military-industrial business.
"We're doing better than we were yesterday" isn't good enough. The amount of death and violence we have is not acceptable for a "developed" country.
The crack era 1980's probably accounted for quite a bit of violence, much like the late 1970's and early 1980's coke era. So did the war on cocaine do any good?
Good thread topic, as a reminder. Side note: do people see the Atlantic as liberal? They've had some of the best, most unvarnished and unapologetic reporting on ISIS, and they seem to regularly poke their thumb in the eye of typical liberal thinking. I do love them, so maybe that's a sign that they are dirty liberals.
The 90s was a crazy decade for american violence. You had freeway road rages(now mostly mitigated by the popularity of cellphones), the Crips vs Bloods and everything in between (gangs now are out of favor vs personal interest criminals) and the raise of Mexican drug street gang affiliated with cartels after the fall the Columbian cartels. The 90s was an interesting time.
The homicide rate is actually lower today than it was in 1950, in fact, it's lower today than at any point since the late 50's
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Gun ownership has fallen tremendously in the last 40 years. http://www.norc.org/PDFs/GSS Reports/GSS_Trends in Gun Ownership_US_1972-2014.pdf Does that mean less guns less crime?
srsly http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/04/23/battleground-america I don't know if it's because people exist in alternate realities on this forum, or are often bad at interpreting anecdotal data points as aggregate ones :/ america need more STEM grads
the "nuclear family" is falling apart. religion has declined. we're living in a moral apocalypse age with snowflake children that play way too much GTA. and the world has never been in a better place on almost every violence stat. The long-term decline of violence since the Middle Ages has been one of the hidden stories of humanity's better lights, correlated with freer sexuality, more knowledge, less religion, and less traditional households. watch and learn religious extremists of all stripes. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...nd_lines_reveal_an_increasingly_peaceful.html
I think the priorities of the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s News Media when it comes to violence in the news was much more low key. I don't have the time or will to do a search but I'm thinking rampage mass killing shootings did happen quite often and were covered up or under covered well before 'Columbine High School' incident. What do you guys think? I guess what comes to mine was the mass shootings of the cocaine wars in South Florida but nobody thought they were much of a big deal?
I agree with those that blame the media. So much focus, plus now we have all these crime channels that play shows about murders over and over. The perception doesn't match the reality.
