From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Fri Aug 30 2002 - 05:05:24 MDT
Murder in America
by Mark Thornton
While listening to NPR in my car, I heard a report on recently published
research by Dr. Stephen Thomas and his colleagues at Harvard Medical
College. The combination of NPR and Harvard almost led me to tune my
radio to a country music station, but the report was enlightening.
Dr. Thomas's thesis is that improvements in the quality and quantity of
medical care over the last forty years have resulted in an increasing
percentage of lives being saved when people are shot or stabbed in an
attempted murder. With improvements in emergency vehicle response time,
trauma systems, medical technology, and pharmaceuticals - all
attributable to the private sector - this is no doubt the case.
The issue at hand is the surprising decline in the murder rate over the
last decade or so. Reported crime rates have been declining during the
1990s, but most of this reduction in crime rates is the result of two
factors. First, the private sector defense industry has expanded in
response to high rates of crime to provide defense weaponry, alarm and
security systems, and private police and security services. Read Bruce
Benson's great book, To Serve and Protect, to find out all the details,
but the conclusion is that private police defense is now larger, more
effective, and less costly compared to its public sector counterpart.
Second, many types of crimes are now routinely not reported to the
police. Most victims now realize that unless you can tell the police who
the criminal was, it's not worth reporting crimes unless your insurance
policy requires it. In high crime areas, victims fully realize that it
is not worth reporting crimes and they usually don't have insurance.
For the rest of this article, see
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/thornton4.html
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