At 10:24 PM 03/05/2001 -0800, Joe Dees wrote:
> >
> > IAN: Guns don't make people do drive-by shootings.
> > To a large extent they are a result of disputes over
> > illicit-drug sales. I believe the increase in murder
> > in the US is more linkable to drug laws than to a
> > lack of gun laws, and so the harmful results of one
> > prohibition are used to justify another prohibition.
> >
>Drive-by knifings are a bit more difficult, though.
IAN: The chart below suggests to me that murder rates are
more strongly linked to drug laws than to gun access. Although
it's also not that simple. I suspect tapering off in the mid-90s
may be attributable to cocaine-mobs beginning to establish their
territory in the heavy cocaine market that opened after the 80s
crackdown on imported marijuana. Note that the peaks are strongly
(although not necessarily perfectly) correlated with drug wars
(including alcohol prohibition). The slowly-decreasing post-
alcohol-prohibition murder rate might be due to rum-running gangs
still doing illicit (and thus potentially murderous) operations
of some kind for a while, until the profits form the fat-time of
prohibition were consumed and redistributed to legal activities.
Then 1970 shows the beginning of an upward murder-rate rise that
matches the drug war that really picked up then to suppress the
60s rebellion and kept increasing all during the rapid climb in
the murder rate. This of course assumes this list is accurate.
I did find murder-rate numbers for several of the years below
on other pages, and they were the same numbers as given here:
U.S. Murder Rate Since 1900 (rate shown is per 100,000 population)
1900: 1.5
1910: 4.3
1920: 6.4
1930: 8.2
1935: 9.6
1940: 6.0
1950: 5.0
1960: 4.7
1970: 8.0
1980: 10.3
1990: 10.0
1996: 7.4
http://www.graybeardoutdoors.com/facts.htm
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Roger Williams --> http://users.erols.com/igoddard/roger.htm
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