Originally Posted by
IMPress Polly
Were the rates of violent crime lower in the 1940s though?
That the mental health condition of the U.S. population today explains very little about the violent crime that remains is my point. I struggle with more than one mental illness and have thus far attempted to murder no one in the course of my life. And although I'm a strong proponent of gun ownership, I'd concede that even gun possession explains only a finite amount of it (as it's irrelevant to this particular case, for example). The single most common thing that murderers, rapists, and terrorists tend to have in common isn't that they are mentally ill or even that they have guns in their possession, but that they are one-sidedly (as in more than 80%) male. That's a problem that we should think about as a society, I believe. We need to think about how we socialize boys in order to actually solve problems like these, I believe.