Could be simple laziness. Are maimings up?

I vote for the stupider option.

My answer is C: neither. We are just as violent and just as smart, but entertainment quality/quantity has increased.

Face it: what would you rather do? Buy an expensive gun and shoot people, or play an online game accessible from any libary/home?

Now, you might argue about the movie quality, but, we have lost nothing from the past. You can still watch a movie from the 80s. You can now just watch a movie from the 90s or today as well. Even if 90% of what hollywood churns out is crap, since they make over 150 movies/year, that means 15 good movies are made. That's about 30 hours people will have to be sitting and watching a movie, when they could be out killing people.

I commented, hit Submit, and got this message:

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@imao.us and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

::waving gun::

Oooh I'm angry now. I think I'll go commit a violent crim so I can feel better.

Crim? I guess I fall into the stupider category. That makes me even more likely to go out and be violent... gangsta style.

hmmm .... and here I thought it might just be that we're keeping the perps in the slammer where they belong .... or maybe frying their butts to let them know they were bad ....

There is an interesting discussion of this phenomenon here.

To summarize, neither the article's author nor I support abortion in any way, but it appears that abortion is to blame (thank?) for the lowered crime rate. Roe vs. Wade was in 1973 and crime rates started to fall in the 90s.

The idea is that the people who had abortions were mostly the kind of people who weren't fit to raise law-abiding children. The thing that really makes this believable for me is that some states legalized abortion several years earlier than Roe vs. Wade, and in those states, the crime rate began to fall exactly that number of years earlier. The article is worth reading (IMHO).

Actually, I guess what I was talking about is a bit different from the article Frank linked. Still interesting though...

Well, that "gangsta" sideways-grip so often seen in videos & movies SHOULD be as effective if the intended target is at arm's-length....

Decrease in murders could also be due to the well-known global shortage of earplugs & hearing protectors. One time I neglected to put mine on while target shooting (Colt Anaconda .44 mag)

-- after firing three rounds my ears began ringing.. LOUDLY.... took nearly a week for it to subside.

Always wondered how in a movie, a bunck of actors could have a gun battle with dozens (hundreds) of rounds fired in an office, warehouse, whatever - and NOT spend the rest of the scene shouting "WHAT?", "HUH?", etc! :)

I think it goes with the increase in concealed carry and gun ownership. They didn't say deaths were down, just that murders were. It's not murder when I use my legally concealed weapon correctly (upright) to shoot some stupid gangsta holding his gun sideways trying to shoot me.

The part I found interesting in the Fox report was this:

The Southern regional murder rate declined 5 percent to 6.6 per 100,000.

Blumstein said that might have been driven by declines in Atlanta; Memphis, Tenn., and New Orleans, each with over 100 murders in 2003, or "it might mean the South is becoming more like the rest of the country."

So we're becoming more like a bunch of civilized Yankees? Now that's worth killing over!

I recently saw where one of the aftermarket gun site makers has come out with a set of gun sites made to be put onto the side of a semiauto pistol for those people who want to shoot sideways. Of course it would require three sets of sites to be able to shoot ambedextiorusly.

The Freakonomics answer is that most of the crime reduction which started in the 90's is due to Roe v. Wade in the early 70's. Of course, Dr. Bennett tried to address this on his radio program, was quoted out of context by the leftist press and Dem politicians and the discussion ended. Rather than be Mau Mau'd I won't take a position on this theory.