: Don: I think violent crime rates are more due to culture than to economics. The US violent crime rate was higher in the affluent 20's and 60's than in the 30's.Hmmm. I would have to agree with R.D. on this point then. Given the information you present, if the US crime rate dropped during the 1930s, relative to the 20s, it's much more reasonable to link criminality to economics than to "culture." The "culture" of the US remained relatively constant over these two decades, while the economy collapsed. Crime does seem to be linked to economics, but in an extremely complicated way. Absolute wealth, and even national mean annual income are apparently not factors in criminality. Instead, the difference between the resources available to the poor and those available to the rich is highly linearly correlated with the amount of crime.
In other words, if everyone is poor, crime rates are low (since there is nothing to steal, etc.) and if everyone is rich, crime is low, since there is no need to steal. It's not the average wealth that is correlated, but the inequality of access. In a society where a few people are very wealthy, and many are very poor, crime should be higher, since there is both an incentive and an opportunity for criminality.
I tend to agree with R.D. again that this insight inspires a much more "humane" way to combat crime than simply giving everybody a gun. If we instead gave everybody increased access to productive resources, and the resulting increased "stake" in the success of the society, criminality would dry up out of the operation of the self-interst of the affected parties. When you stand more to gain from participating in the economy than combating it, it is in your best interest to not engage in socially irresponsible behavior. I admit that sounds a bit "invisible hand"-ish, but it's more a Darwinian than Randian approach.
I suppose giving everybody a gun would ultimately accomplish the same thing, but I suspect that we would rapidly face a situation similar to that of west Texas/eastern Arizona in the 1840s-1880s, where ultimate decision making authority rests entirely in the hands of the guy who can draw fastest. Frankly, I prefer gun-slingers to appear on film, not in the streets.
: : But not an international one, which would tend to poke some holes in the causation,a nd show that widespread Gun ownership dopsn't prevent murder- apparently there are over 100,000 legally held firearms in the North of Ireland....
VERY good point!
: Don: Lott's study was quite good. It has been improved since it first came out, with new factors being controlled for and different algorithms being employed.
: :What time span did it cover (as compared with the past 100 years studies showing poverty and crime going hand in hand?)
: Don: I believe it was the past 15 years. The time period in which over half of all US states enacted "shall-issue" concealed carry permit laws.
This was also a period of almost unprecidented economic growth for some as well as increasing disparity between the rich and the poor. The correlation between economic conditions and crime still stands. Weapons, alone, can't account for crime statistics or changes in the patterns of criminality. I also wonder if crime declined in any absolute sense, as a result of concealed weapons, or if it simply moved to other areas where the "cost" in terms of risk was lower. If criminals simply moved to a new region, then the handguns don't reduce crime at all, they simply push it into someone else's neighborhood.
A program that actually looks at the causes of criminality and tries to treat those seems, to me, to be ultimately much more useful than simply shuttling criminals into less well-armed cities.
I wonder, what do you think is the root cause of criminal behavior? Is it something that we, as a society can hope to treat, in order to prevent crimes from happening? I can't buy the argument that it's "human nature" since, if it were, there would be no difference in crime rates between countries or through time. I really am curious about your ideas here. I feel that crime is a symptom of a much larger economic phenomenon. Your method of treating the symptom is to arm lots of people, O.K., fine. How might you treat the disease so that the symptoms don't show up in the first place?
-Floyd
