On Sat, 31 Oct 2009 07:21:33 -0500 Jon Roland <jon.rol...@constitution.org> wrote:
> Back in the mid-60s when I did volunteer work with Planned > Parenthood, most of the strongest supporters of legalized abortion > were political conservatives who did so expecting that a reduction in > unwanted children would reduce crime. Later scientific studies seem > to confirm that, but it is interesting that (a) the result was > anticipated; and (b) that whose who self-identify as "conservative" > switched position on the issue of abortion. I was not aware of that switch, but have seen something similar. When we embarked on gold legalization in 1970 or so, we expected that conservatives would join us on the usual hard money arguments, hedge against inflation, etc. We didn't always get their votes. We found we could do very well with liberals with an argument that, since gold is no longer part of the international monetary system, there's no longer any need to make it illegal. Thus, may of our votes were from liberals. > > In 2005 I visited the court archives of New York State for the > 1776-1804 timeframe and was surprised at how few crimes there were. > In some years there was not a single felony in the entire state. > Crime was many orders of magnitude less than it is today. The main > things that seem to have changed are urbanization and contamination > of the environment, because we find similar correlates in other > countries. We need to remind ourselves of Calhoun's studies of the > population density of rats and the pathologies that high density > produced. There is stress from interpersonal contact and as the > frequency of such contact increases, the stress rises and so does > pathological behavior. People and rats need private spaces into which > they can retreat to reduce such stress. I also recall reading in Scientific American a summary of a study of English court records from the middle ages. Populous urban centers such as London had crime rates comparable to modern populous urban centers such as New York, medieval rural areas had crime rates comparable to modern rural areas, etc. -- Charles Curley /"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign Looking for fine software \ / Respect for open standards and/or writing? X No HTML/RTF in email http://www.charlescurley.com / \ No M$ Word docs in email Key fingerprint = CE5C 6645 A45A 64E4 94C0 809C FFF6 4C48 4ECD DFDB _______________________________________________ To post, send message to Firearmsregprof@lists.ucla.edu To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/firearmsregprof Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.
