It's all very enlightening.
Allow me to digress a bit from the red meat conservative fascination with guns and suggest instead that turning the police force into a clone of the First Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF) is not going to solve the problem, assuming the problem has been identified as crime. If the problem is that we're not killing people with sufficiently cool weaponry, then this is indeed the correct solution.
If we want to cut the crime rate, then we need to become prudes.
All but three of 23 recent studies found some family structure effect on crime or delinquency. Seven of the eight studies that used nationally representative data, for example, found that children in single-parent or other non-intact family structures were at greater risk of committing criminal or delinquent acts. For example: A study using Add-Health data found that even after controlling for race, parents' education, and income, adolescents in single-parent families were almost two times more likely to have pulled a knife or a gun on someone in the past year. (Todd Michael Franke 2000)Emphasis mine.
Six of seven studies that looked at whether overall rates of single parenthood affected average crime rates found that changes in family structure were related to increases in crime. For example:
· A study that looked at the relation between divorce rates and out-of-wedlock birthrates and violent crime between 1973 and 1995 found that nearly 90% of the change in violent crime rates can be accounted for by the change in percentages of out-of-wedlock births. (Mackey and Coney 2000, p. 352)
· A study that looked at crime in rural counties in four states concluded, "[A]n increase of 13% in female-headed households would produce a doubling of the offense rate." (Osgood and Chambers 2000, p. 103)
Gads, how hideous! Why the very thought that we might need to come out against sex in any way at all makes me queasy. Can't we just give the cops M-1 tanks instead?
4 comments:
You are on the money. If the good reverends Sharpton, Jackson and Wright would spend more time preaching self-respect, responsibility, and self-restraint, instead of looking for more ways to make minorities feel hopeless and weak, maybe we wouldn't need to turn our cities in police-states. Yes, Bill Cosby is condemned by some, for making these points, but his message does get out. If more people took up the message it would spread even faster.
People provided no hope are killing each other. Good revs do tell; what was that about chickens coming home to roost?
Night Owl
Allow me to digress a bit from the red meat conservative fascination with guns and suggest instead that turning the police force into a clone of the First Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF) is not going to solve the problem, assuming the problem has been identified as crime.
Dunno about that. If some M4s are all it will take to get the Chicago PD to seek out and engage the badguys with the same level of dedication and determination as I MEF, the problem will be solved in short order.
Of course, we all know that's not gonna happen, so yeah, however-many-millions get spent on new tacticool gizmos might as well be flushed down a toilet... but even going prude isn't going to solve the problem.
What is going on is a gang war. Two outfits want to control the same turf. Why do they want to control the turf? So they can have a monopoly on the local market for narcotics.
If you want to stop the shootings (which are mostly criminal-on-criminal), legalize the drugs. You'll be trading one set of problems for another, but you won't have street gangs fighting over drug turf.
Hi, anon! Thanks for leaving a comment. Unfortunately, I must disagree with you. Having spent quite some time with drug addicts, unless you're willing to open up massive numbers of mental institutions to deal with the vast increase in citizens driven insane from drug addictions, legalizing drugs is not the answer.
There's a reason drugs are illegal. It has to do with the biology of the human brain.
You'll be trading one set of problems for another, but you won't have street gangs fighting over drug turf. 2nd Anonymous.
How true. Kind of ironic that it is right around the 38th anniversary of Kent State that you posted this.
Some things are worse than street gangs.
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