An Oxford-style debate of the topic, with three experts on each side, and a poll of an audience before and after they make their arguments.

[ Do Guns Reduce Crime? | intelligencesquaredus.com ]

The admin for our team came in today (her name is Denise) with bad news from the weekend. One of her kids had his car stolen, and upon returning to his house he found the door wide open. A 52″ TV, as well as two laptops and a number of other valuables were stolen. This was in a nearby state.

She sits 4 feet from me.

So then one of my team members comes in and says he had a bad weekend as well. His two sons were held up at gun point on the south side of the city I live in. They didn’t just take their belongings; they also beat them up pretty good.

He sits 4 feet from me, behind me.

My other teammate, Chris, has had two cars stolen in our town in two years.

Then there was the story of the 71-year-old man who was in a Subway in Miami over the weekend. Two guys guys came in with guns and held the place up, and then tried taking the old man into the bathroom in the back.

He had a legal firearm, concealed, which he then drew and used. He shot one in the head and one in the chest. The one shot in the head died shortly afterwards, and the second one ran away and was captured by police after he hid in a bush. I’m just glad that old man had his pistol with him.

No charges were filed.

The mother of the man that was killed is upset because the old man fired on her son. She should be ashamed of herself.

–

I expect the crime numbers for 2008, country wide, to be alarming. More to follow.

To put it more bluntly, the reason crime dropped so much in the 90’s was because many of the people who would have been committing the crimes simply weren’t there. In other words, federal support of abortion lowered the crime rate.

Wikipedia on the Donohue and Levitt Study:

Donohue and Levitt use statistics to point to the fact that males aged 18 to 24 are most likely to commit crimes. Data indicate that crime started to decline in 1992. Donohue and Levitt suggest that the absence of unwanted aborted children, following legalization in 1973, led to a reduction in crime 18 years later, starting in 1992 and dropping sharply in 1995. These would have been the peak crime-committing years of the unborn children.

The authors argue that states that had abortion legalized earlier and more widespread should have the earliest reductions in crime. Donohue and Levitt’s study indicates that this indeed has happened: Alaska, California, Hawaii, New York, and Washington experienced steeper drops in crime, and had legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade. Further, states with a high abortion rate have experienced a greater reduction in crime, when corrected for factors like average income. Finally, studies in Canada and Australia have established a correlation between legalized abortion and crime reduction.

So that raises the questions:

1. What percentage of Americans do you think know this?
2. How do you think a responsible society should use such information?

Links

[ Legalized Abortion and Crime Effect | wikipedia.com ]

[ Google Results for Topic ]

There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps . . . then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved. — Jesse Jackson

[ Destruction in Black America is Self-Inflicted ]

Some very good points in this article, such as the fact that there’s a 93% chance that a black male murder victim will be killed by another black male. Insane.

Most poignant in my opinion, however, was the point that we must start talking about this problem more than we are if we want to solve it. As the article says, we can’t solve problems that we’re too frightened to even discuss.:

This is a very interesting piece by the New York Times on the demographics and relationships between suspect and victim in New York homicides. They even have a Google Maps overlay.

[ Link: New York Crime Statistics ]

Thanks to Tim Stevens for the link

A refreshing look at the issue of race and crime.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-02-07hm.html

Now if we could just apply this type of logical thought to more than just New York, and to more than just race and crime.