|
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 also did a study myself in 1969 which found that $1 spent on providing and promoting birth control or abortion yielded $139 in reduced costs for tax-funded programs of the time over a 18-year period. That did not include savings for law enforcement, incarceration, and injuries to crime victims, but one can imagine such a study being done, and getting a fairly high estimate. One could then compare it to the costs of gun control enforcement. One expects that contraception and abortion would have a higher payoff. 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. On 10/31/2009 06:24 AM, Ron wrote: This is similar to the old argument that crime decreased because of legalized abortions, awful hard to prove one contributed to the other. -- Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------- Constitution Society 2900 W Anderson Ln C-200-322, Austin, TX 78757 512/299-5001 www.constitution.org [email protected] ------------------------------------------------------------------- |
_______________________________________________ To post, send message to [email protected] 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.
