Recently, in our never-ending search to bring you facts to debunk the lies of the anti-self-preservation Left, we came across a joke headline that read, “Statistics Show That Criminals Commit Less Crime After They’ve Been Shot.”
The link leads to an image of a smart-looking woman and the text of the headline. That’s amusing, and a little disappointing- but it got us thinking. What we thought is, well, “hey, that’s probably true.” It stands to reason, a criminal who’s been shot is less likely to be able to complete a criminal act. It’s also probably true that among the class of criminals who have been shot, some portion of them will be less physically capable of committing crimes than they were before they were shot.
So, we fired up the Google machine, (Duckduckgo, actually), and looked for evidence that corroborates the claim in that amusing meme. Here’s what we found:
The New York Times did a piece in 2015 that discusses the fact that criminals over a certain age commit less crime. They write, “The idea of a 21-year sentence for mass murder and terrorism may seem radically lenient in the United States, where life without parole is often presented as a humane alternative to the death penalty.”
This is along the lines once suggested by Jordan Peterson that most criminality is acted out by men who are between the ages of 15 and 30. He supposed, without exactly promoting the idea, that if we kept violent offenders in prison until they turn 30 it would cut recidivism rates down by a bundle.
What we’re getting at here is that decreased vigor and decreased rates of violence are connected. How could it be otherwise? But we hadn’t found our gem yet.
After looking at criminal recidivism stats compiled by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there seems to be less criminal activity in the category of criminal who has been wounded in the act of committing a crime.
The NYT writes, “[…] criminal careers do not last very long. Research by the criminologist Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon and colleagues has found that for the eight serious crimes closely tracked by the F.B.I. — murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, arson and car theft — five to 10 years is the typical duration that adults commit these crimes, as measured by arrests.”
The reasons for the limitations on the length of time violent criminals actively pursue their vocation are age, injury, disease… and hopefully accumulated wisdom. It stands to reason that being shot can abbreviate a criminal’s career. We wish we could say the same, about white-collar criminals and political criminals. Unfortunately, there’s much less opportunity for the victims of their crimes to defend themselves.
One study we found which attempts to conclude that “ghunz er bhaad” makes this statement, “Technically weak research mostly supports the hypothesis, while strong research does not. It must be tentatively concluded that higher gun ownership rates do not cause higher crime rates, including homicide rates.”
Translation: “Our best studies show legal gun ownership decreases crime.”
We hate to say we told you so. Wait, no we don’t.
We told you so.
