Miss California?

[BroomJockey]

It's true that it's anecdotal (one of the weakest forms of evidence) but I have no real reason to think these people are lying.

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/hmrt.htm Here is the link again. It shows about a 4.8-4.9 rate in the 1950s, down to maybe 4.5 around 1960, and it's under 5.5 by 2005, which is as far as the graph goes.

As for the anecdotes, they weren't lying. But you forget, media proliferation was laughable. There were 3 TV stations, the local news paper, and the radio. National coverage was what individual networks picked up. That means if something happened on the end of the country opposite you, you'd never hear about it except in extreme cases. Now, however, everyone in Washington state hears about it when a child goes missing in Florida because there's stations that are devoted to news, 24/7, sensationalism brings in viewers, and with 500 channels to compete with, they need to push the panic buttons. Gang violence? Murder? Drugs? Child abuse/molestation/kidnapping? Oh yeah, you better believe that will pull in the viewers. And even if you don't watch TV, if you go on the internet, you'll see it there, too. You're virtually guaranteed to have someone in a forum post about the high-profile cases, even if you never visit a news site.

In the 50s, if it didn't happen within a day's driving distance, people just shook their heads, and thanked heavens it didn't affect them, if they even managed to hear about it. Now, the media plays up each incident, and since it's in the news more often, parents are more paranoid about letting their children out of their site, despite the numerous studies showing the large number of cases that involve people already known to the victim. This is the reason anecdotal evidence is considered so weak. People's reactions can be grossly out of proportion to the actual threat, in one direction to the other.

[Rubystars]

Thanks for reposting the graph. It does look like crime went up after all the stuff in the 60s, but if it's going back down now, then that's good. I hope it continues to go down. I still don't really believe the reality on the ground is as safe as it was back then.

I had a couple of incidents happen to me on my college campus which were pretty scary, and I was actually at work once when the in-store bank got robbed and I had to hide behind my till. I was trapped in the cigarette bullpen so I couldn't just run away without the bad guys seeing me.

Sometimes I wish I could have lived in an earlier time, because even if I wouldn't have had as many rights maybe I still would have been safer. Of course it's not right to idealize the past either, but I still think there were things about it that were superior.

[Flyndaran]

No, but you did post about national purity. There's no such thing as a "true American." We aren't all white, nor did we all come from the same place.

I also feel the need to mention that there were at least three separate immigrations into the americas thousands of years ago.
There is even evidence of a completely different technologically inferior aboriginal type of people before even that.
They got their asses handed to them by the guys with bows and arrows. The somewhat survived into the present day by interbreeding with the people of the southern tip of south america.

I'm oart native american: cherokee and blackfoot, mexican, irish, scottish, english, and india sub-continental indian. Who knows I might even have a little black in me.
Where on earth do I belong except in the U.S.?

[Rubystars]

I don't have time to keep up with this thread and the other one. All I can say is I don't know how you guys got the impression when I said Europe that I meant the USA. I'm going back to the other thread now.