wheatpenny opened this issue on Mar 21, 2005 ยท 425 posts
XENOPHONZ posted Mon, 21 March 2005 at 8:49 PM
On the note on predators. As someone who works in criminal justice, the actual numbers of these kinds of people is -DOWN-. In fact numbers are dropping fast from historic highs, and have been doing so for far longer than the current conservative swing in society. In fact the trend for all violent crime has been going down since the middle ages...
Oh, really?
The 20th century was about the bloodiest in recorded history.
Let's see.....
Stalin killed around 30 million or so....more directly than Hitler did.
Hitler helped to finish around 40 million or so -- if you include all of those that died as a result of WWII. Hitler's party.
Not to mention Mao, Pol Pot, the Turkish massacre of Armenians, Rwanda.....just to name a few of the more famous cases.
I could go on and on, but you get the general idea.
The Mongols only managed to kill an estimated 10,000,000 or so during their conquests.
Crime down since the Middle Ages? In the Western world, perhaps.
But the world as a whole? I don't think so........
Sure, some crimes in the US have been dropping since the 80's. And this is largely due to the fact that a number of criminals are being locked up, and the key thrown away.
Due to the "conservative swing" in certain attitudes.
;-)
But as a rule -- at least in the US -- in grandad's day, one rarely (very rarely) saw crimes of the magnitude of the Florida case.
Old men used to be able to play checkers on the streets of downtown Philadelphia -- in neighborhoods that one wouldn't be caught (so to speak) "dead" in these days.
And one never saw a Columbine High School massacre. Even though it was possible to easily mail order a howitzer, complete with shells.
Nope. It's not as complex, or as simple.....as some would like to make it out to be.