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America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
2muchcoffeeman writes "The cause of the great increase in violent crime that started in the 1960s and peaked in the 1990s may have been isolated: lead. This leads directly to the reason for the sharp decline in violent crime since then: lead abatement programs and especially the ban of tetraethyl lead as an anti-knock agent in gasoline starting in 1996. There are three reasons why this makes sense. First, the statistics correlate almost perfectly. Second, it holds true worldwide with no exceptions. Every country studied has shown this same strong correlation between leaded gasoline and violent crime rates. Third, the chemistry and neuroscience of lead gives us good reason to believe the connection. Decades of research has shown that lead poisoning causes significant and probably irreversible damage to the brain. Not only does lead degrade cognitive abilities and lower intelligence, it also degrades a person's ability to make decisions by damaging areas of the brain responsible for emotional regulation, impulse control, attention, verbal reasoning, and mental flexibility. Another thing that stands out: if you overlay a map showing areas with higher incidence of violent crime with one showing lead contamination, there's a strikingly high correlation."
False Lead
And didn't help lead to the downfall of Rome as well? I believe they had a lot of lead in their wine containers.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
If you don't fill someone full of lead, they don't fill someone else full of lead?
I'm throwing this damned mechanical pencil away.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
its not lead its the upbringing of people out of poverty
Except that the rise in the standard of living of the poor does not match the decline in crime.
I only consume unleaded ice cream. Am I still susceptible?
Depends if it's fluoridated or not. There's a reason I only drink rain water and grain alcohol, you know.
I am not a crackpot.
That's dumb. Poor people from the early 80's might not have had X-boxes, but they did have video games (Atari, Intellivision and Odyssey systems spring to mind, not to mention arcade games which were just taking off). Plus (and this applies even if you go back before the 80's) there was still TV, books, magazines, radio, and so on. Sorry, but 20th-century crime rates can't be blamed on a lack of entertainment options for the poor. At least not by anyone who 1)is being honest and 2)knows what the fuck they're talking about.
Except it isn't just simple time correlation. There is also spatial correlation (areas with different lead contamination, different countries) and for individuals there is causal link between lead poisoning these behavioural problems.
Nobody in a right state of mind is going to rob or kill a random someone just because they're bored.
However, lead poisoning causes brain damage, which can lead to psychosis. And the study shows correlation between violent crime rates and lead concentration.
If it were just a matter of being bored, I would fear for the world. That would imply that we're all rapists and murderers, and that unless we're significantly distracted by our 'stuff' we're prone to rape and murder out of sheer boredom. That's not really the case though. For the most part, people don't rape and murder eachother, except under pretty significant mental distress or disorder.
A study like this is useful because it might bring up other ways of investigating criminal trends. Could there be something environmental that causes mental health issues in a population? Drug/alcohol abuse? Lack of health care opportunities? Birth defects caused by some environmental source? Toxins from some environmental source?
Dismissing it as "people just have more x-boxes so they probably don't get bored and kill people" is pretty pointless. Does poverty factor into it? Maybe. But can we tell if poverty instigates the crime, or if the mental degradation caused by something like lead poisoning (or drug/alcohol abuse, or mental deficiency from birth) both instigates the crime and makes the person have a more difficult time caring for themselves leading to a life of poverty?
That's not even to say that bringing people out of poverty doesn't help the situation. It has a mental effect (reducing stress by making available necessities). But why weren't those people in Central Park just happy to play chess? It's not just that they had nothing better to do, it's more likely that they had a problem that went ignored.
Except we do know very well that lead exposure at a young age DOES result in poor impulse control, lower IQ, and a greater tendency towards violence.
Did you read the actual article? He address those topics precisely. He waited to publish this article until he had a stack of corroborating studies using different methodologies. One study is nothing. Many different studies of many different places, and each one maps well? That's a whole heaping mound of coincidence.
http://xkcd.com/552/
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.
Did you read the linked article in full? They have more than a simple correlation. They have multiple correlations cross-culturally, and at every level of analysis examined, national, state and neighborhood. It's also backed up by the neurobiological research about the effects of even small quantities of lead on the brain.
Yes, it is correct to be skeptical of claims of causation from correlational data. That's what additional research is for to check for other possible causes is for. That additional research has all supported the claim of causation, to a far higher degree than any other claimed cause.
Skepticism simply for the sake of skepticism is not a virtue. If you demand a high standard of proof, it behooves you to be ready to accept the claims of those who actually manage to meet that standard of proof.
You're kidding? Is this the first time you've read Mother Jones?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Except you've made a leap transforming beers to hammers. Your premise do not actually support your argument (which is obviously intentional) and you suggest it is similar his argument and then proceed to beat that strawman down. You follow up with a false dichotomy suggesting that either your argument is valid or his cannot be valid.
The problem is that his argument is supported by his premise where yours is not.
is leap is that lead is proven to cause people to become violent, therefore it is reasonable that the documented decline in known sources of lead poisoning could be related to a reduction in violence. This logically follows and his premise is supported.
Bullets are known to cause death. Therefore it is reasonable to suggest that the bullets I'm firing into the crowd might be responsible for the dead people in the crowd.
Cannabis is known to get you high. Therefore it is reasonable to suggest that the marijuana found in the stoned teenagers posession might have been what he used to get high.
Now lets try yours:
Bullets cause death. Knives cause death. Therefore bullets are made of knives.
Cats have claws. Dogs have claws. Therefore dogs are made of cats.
What a crock of sh*t! I grew up around lead, lead pipes in the house, lead paint, lead-acid batteries, etc. I haven't tried to kill anyone, and last I knew, I had a very high IQ (well, at least in HS, many, many years ago anyway), so this study is BS! We need lead in every day life. We need lead in solder, batteries, electronics, weights, etc. Lead is a very important metal, we can not do without it.
I am so sick of these environmentalist freaks, so sick.
So sick you wish to do them violent harm perhaps? :)
False. "Wilding" in general, and that famous NYC case, were totally fictitious bullshit made up by wild-eyed media and cops. The convictions of the juveniles were overturned years later, when a single man confessed and also had DNA evidence confirm it. Ken Burns had a documentary on their story at Cannes just last year. Exemplary case study of the great fraud that is our law-enforcement and security apparatus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_Jogger_case
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Gun control mitigates the damage criminals do, and significantly raises the difficulty of getting enraged and killing someone with a particularly lethal weapon at hand.
Not really. You could kill more people with a gallon of gasoline and a couple of bike locks than I could with all the guns I could carry.
The worst mass murders have always been committed by means other than guns, even in the US. Most such killings are committed with guns but there is no reason to think the perpetrators wouldn't just move on to the next most convenient methodology if they couldn't obtain firearms.
The UK and germany for example have much higher violent crime rates than the US (and a lot of that is stabbings, and football hooliganism), but much lower murder rates because criminals in those places try and stab rather than shoot.
One huge problem with that old canard is the correlation between firearm murder rates and firearms regulations in various areas of the US. Areas with more guns in the hands of more law-abiding citizens have less crime, not more. If you're worried about being killed with a gun, the last place you want to live in the US is an area like DC or Chicago with strict gun control laws.
You can mutter about post-hoc fallacies and correlation not implying causation, but the reality is that gun-control proponents have very few statistics they can cite to advance their cause, and a lot of statistics they don't dare cite.
Ultimately it's very hard to separate cultural effects from the effects of firearms availability. This is true both within the US and between different nations as a whole. I won't go too far down that path because I don't have time to defend myself against accusations of bias and worse, but I will say that as a middle-aged male in an economically well off, culturally-homogenous area, any gun control measures that affect what weapons I can own are not going to make you any safer.
However, there statistics are far from a perfect match. If it were, we would have reverted back to pre 1950's crime levels. We haven't, we're not really even close.
Because all the lead that has accumulated from burning leaded gasoline while it was widespread has just magically disappeared away?
This group seems to believe that just because "the statistics correlate almost perfectly" that they have a cause.
They happen to believe that they have a cause because they have came up with a simple rule of correlation based on two data sets, and then went on to see if it applies to a dozen different unrelated ones (matching the dates of introduction of leaded gasoline and the ban on it in various countries across the globe) - and they found that the correlation still holds in all cases that they've measured so far. In other words, they've made a prediction, and found that it matches the facts. That's hard science.
The specific risks and effects of TEL were known as early as 1923, when the inventor took a prolonged vacation to cure lead poisoning. Here are excerpts from the wikipedia article for Thomas Midgley, Jr. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley,_Jr.
[...] In December 1921, while working under the direction of Kettering at Dayton Research Laboratories, a subsidiary of General Motors, Midgley discovered that the addition of TEL to gasoline prevented "knocking" in internal combustion engines.
[...] In 1923, Midgley took a prolonged vacation to cure himself of lead poisoning. "After about a year's work in organic lead," he wrote in January 1923, "I find that my lungs have been affected and that it is necessary to drop all work and get a large supply of fresh air." He went to Miami, Florida for convalescence.
[...] However, after two deaths and several cases of lead poisoning at the TEL prototype plant in Dayton, Ohio, the staff at Dayton was said in 1924 to be "depressed to the point of considering giving up the whole tetraethyl lead program." Over the course of the next year, eight more people would die at DuPont's Deepwater, New Jersey plant.
[...] On October 30, 1924, Midgley participated in a press conference to demonstrate the apparent safety of TEL. In this demonstration, he poured TEL over his hands, then placed a bottle of the chemical under his nose and inhaled its vapor for sixty seconds, declaring that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems whatsoever. However, the State of New Jersey ordered the Bayway plant to be closed a few days later, and Jersey Standard was forbidden to manufacture TEL there again without state permission. Midgley himself was careful to avoid mentioning to the press that he required nearly a year to recover from the lead poisoning brought on by his demonstration at the press conference.
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