http://todayhealth.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/06/19/12298215-teenager-shot-with-spear-through-head-survives?lite
This teen will almost certainly live and will probably make a reasonable recovery. Score another for the power of modern trauma medicine. Such medicine has made our homicide rate deceptively much lower (the 'conversion rate' of aggravated assault into being actually killed has fallen dramatically since the 1960s, see previous posts here on that topic). In addition, it has made the fatal accident rate much lower, and not just in automobile accidents. This plays into one of the strong meta-themes here at the Chariot: Improvements in Technology account for nearly all of the improvements in the lives of ordinary people, in many cases hiding massive increases of dysfunction caused by malgovernance.
Update: Simply slothful on my part not to include this link
http://chariotofreaction.blogspot.com/2012/05/homicide-narrative-revised-to.html
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3 comments:
Interesting point of view, I haven't heard still that the rates of homicide lowered!
Improvements in Technology account for nearly all of the improvements in the lives of ordinary people...
That plus the War on Drugs, which has the unintended effect of imprisoning people (the stupid) most likely to commit other types of crime.
Nick,
The war on drugs' effect should probably not be credited to the government, as they created the problem in the first place. Policing techniques @1950-1970 can maintain (did maintain, still DO maintain in NYC where the regular rules don't apply) order without need of mass incarceration. It would be interesting though, to plot a graph of total institutional control as a fraction of the population vs the normalized homicide rate. By total institutional control we'd add anyone in the involuntary mental health system.
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