Still 53% our way. Yes, parts of that article were drivel, but at least he tried to deflate some of the hysteria:
LET’S START WITH a list of things we shouldn’t do.
We shouldn’t try to explain why youth crime is on the increase, as 62 percent of Americans believe. All categories of juvenile crime are on the decline, and homicides by kids have dropped a significant 56 percent since 1993.
We shouldn’t call the Flint tragedy a school shooting. Let’s call it what it really is: a 6-year-old’s shooting. To his credit, the prosecutor has already made clear that, unlike Nathaniel’s case, he will not hold the Flint child criminally culpable. My son, also six, is still grappling with his belief in the Tooth Fairy, to hold him as culpable as a 40-year-old, or even a 14-year-old, for this tragedy, would have been absurd.
We shouldn’t think that kids are killing at increasingly younger ages, a refrain we hear whenever such tragedies occur. Kids under 13 account for one-tenth of one percent of America’s homicides. In fact, according to FBI data, homicide by youths under 13 was at its second-lowest point in 1998 since the FBI began collecting that statistic in 1965.
We shouldn’t think that school shootings are on the increase, either. According to the National School Safety Center, there were 55 school-associated violent deaths in the 1992/1993 school year, and 29 last year. The Centers for Disease Control have reported that assaults in schools have dropped 20 percent since 1993, and that there is less than a one-in-a- million chance of being shot in one of America’s schools. President Clinton is indeed correct when he states that schools are the safest places for our children to be in America.
We shouldn’t invoke the old bromide of “trying more youths as adults” as our solution, as occurred in Nathaniel Abraham’s case. A study by researchers Donna Bishop and Charles Frazier showed that youths tried as adults were rearrested more quickly, more frequently, and for more serious offenses than youths with similar offense backgrounds who were retained in the juvenile justice system. The states that do try more youths as adults than any other — New York and Florida — have consistently had the highest rates of youth violence in the country, respectively. Apparently, if you lock up a teenager with an adult offender, he gets more than just a cellmate, he gets a role model.
