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Crime usually increases as the economy craps out. Recently (since January 20th, 2001, it seems...) that the economy has not collapsed in the traditional sense, but there is a slow decline in the standard of living as wages remain stagnent while productivity rises (less pay per item produces, and costs of living continue to climb. Gasoline, natural gas, home heating oil, electicity, health care, and housing costs continue to climb. And with the manufacturing sector moving overseas it is getting harder and hard to find jobs that pay between basic service-sector jobs and managerial jobs. The decline of labor unions probably isn't helping either.
I personally think that the decline of manufacturing jobs, of making tangible things, is what is driving general fustration with low to lower-middle income. They have been replaced with dealing with customers, which (to me at least) is a fustrating and low-reward job. At least when you're making something, you can see a pile of finished parts at the end of the day.
Many people will blame guns for this, I don't doubt. I am not one of them, but it is hard to tell. There are some 220 million privately-owned firearms in this country, a number that has been consistant on a per-capita basis for decades. This comprises about two-thirds of all privately-held firearms on the planet and about one-third of all firearms in the world, including military and police arms.
The crime rate started going down during the Clinton years, but that was when several factors that could have affected it kicked in. The Clinton economic boom, the Brady background checks on gun buyers, the Clinton assault-weapons ban, and the Clinton COPS program may all have reduced violent crime rates to varying degrees, although so-called 'assault weapons' were and are used so rarely in crime that all of the hysteria in the media is unfounded.
Since then, the AWB has expired, but remains in effect in several states like California and New York. More significantly, the COPS funding has been entirely eliminated, meaning that some 50,000 cops hired during the Clinton era with federal funds to local police forces are in jeapordy of losing their jobs. Many police forces have actually shrunk as federal COPS funding has dried up, state and local funds shifted to anti-terroristm, and budgets shrank during the stagnant economy.
But this is different from run-of-the-mill crime. This is not being done for drugs, goods or money. It is this hate caused by his peers that drove him to this. Some problems with other students and/or teachers that had deep and wildy emotional roots that went untreated and unresolved until somebody snapped.
I don't know. Given the choice, I'd rather have a student go on a shooting rampage rather than a bombing spree, because overall, shooting terrorist attacks kill less people than explosions. The Columbine shooters killed only 13, despite being heavily armed and a long delay between police arriving on-scene and SWAT entry into the high school. I think it was the real blood, and real human suffering, that stayed their hand. There was a reason that the Nazis began using gas chambers; the soldiers they had doing the massacres prior to the use of the poison gas were having massive mental and morale problems. The instinct to kill in self-defense is much stronger in our collective psyche than killing for the sake of blood. Fighting a war is collective self-defense. Machine-gunning rows of helpless Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, and homosexuals trapped in concentration camps is simple slaughter.
Also, when someone opens up on a crowd of people with a gun, people generally start running and hiding immediately, which limits casualties. There is a reason that the primary terror weapon again Israeli and Iraqi civilians are bombs: they do all of their damage before anybody can react. When you hear reports about shootings in Iraq, you have 4 or five killed. A bomb blast kills dozens. McVeigh killed a 168 with a single bomb, yes if he had waltzed into the Murrah federal building will a fully-automatic AK-47 and plenty of 75-round drum magazines he could not have done anywhere near that.
As an added bonus, a fair percentage of people trying to make bombs blow themselves up, which heads off an attack rather nicely.
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