ARFAQ Spot Check 2: Murder and Aggravated Assault

As time passes, evidence contradicting Sophist Alexander's points accumulates, which necessarily means evidence in favour of reactionary points accumulates. Kindly note this is a prospectively testable prediction.

"lest someone bring up that medical technology has advanced enough to turn many would-be murders into attempted murders – which is true – aggravated assaults, the category of crime that would encompass attempted murders, are less than half of what they were twenty years ago. Kind of hard to square with everything getting worse and more violent all the time."

Twenty years? Oh yeah. "Actually, stopping at 1885 is for losers."

So. What are the facts? (Via an anonymous donor.)

"They found that while the murder rate had changed little from a 1931 baseline figure, assaults had increased. The aggravated assault rate was, by 1997, almost 750% higher than the baseline figure."

Oh good, a twenty year low is still almost eight times higher than going back just a little farther.

Btw, England's homicide rate 1900: 0.96 per 100,000, and America was 1.1. America corrected for race (white only) is now 1.2. Without WWII/Vietnam trauma medicine, American murder (white only) would be, according to these authors, between 2.7 and 5.4.

So, in fact, no it's not hard at all to argue that things are getting worse. Decline advances as progressivism advances.

(Yes the study is 2002, but it's new to me.)

The longest-term trends, going back before the French Terror, are if anything further evidence to the contrary. It merely shows that progressivism is failing to maintain a long-term trend that pre-existed it.

P.S.
On gun control: the Swiss murder rate, where basically every household has a working automatic weapon by law, is 0.6.