Don't be Such a Prude, Arm the Cops!

The erudite and well-intentioned Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee and Pajamas Media has an excellent post on a plan in Chicago to arm the police with assault rifles following an explosion of murders in that city. The post goes on at length about the cost of doing this, discussing the price of weapons, ammunition and training. The comments in that post talk about marksmanship, collateral damage and the possiblity of friendly fire casualties.

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)

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)

Emphasis mine.

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?
Why arm the cops with assault rifles? Because bow ties are icky.