Study Finds Correlation Between Lead Exposure and Gun Violence Suspects AND Victims

Perhaps the key sentences:
During those years, deteriorating lead paint and household dust were contaminating children, many of whom were more likely to be poor and/or African American.

Those same racial and socioeconomic disparities were reflected in the racial and socioeconomic disparity of people overrepresented in the review commission as perpetrators or victims of gun violence.
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perhaps the cause and effect are socioeconomic and not lead exposure
 
Wow 78% of mass shooters smoke weed and nearly 100% use drugs recreationally and there is no correlation. Throw 51% on for lead and it is like Eureka!
 
Well, I guess when there is new construction and everything is replaced, they can do a study 50 years from now and see if the results are repeated.... because I know with this study, the politicians will surely be looking to replace the infrastructure. Maybe there will be a Blue New Deal to rebuild all the water infrastructure along with the Green New Deal that will rebuild every building with new paint.

But having been born and raised in what was the murder capital of the USA in the 70s and 80s, neighborhoods were distinctly different and I don't think paint and water infrastructure was the defining characteristics. I lived in one apartment building that was old... OLD... it was 4 stories... which was the best neighborhood I ever lived in. Then I lived in a new projects where the buildings were 17 and 11 stories and the crime there was significantly worse... and it didn't help sharing a neighborhood border with Brownsville... actual name.

Then living across the south from NC, GA to LA, things were generally the same. It seemed to me socioeconomic factors had more to do with which streets you were hyper vigilant when driving through.
 
The study found that elevated levels of lead in the blood corresponded with a higher probability of being either a shooter or victim of gun violence.
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There's even a higher probability that 147 grains of lead traveling at ~1000fps will stop said shooter. So you see, lead exposer / injection can be a good thing.
 
KyJim said:
perhaps the cause and effect are socioeconomic and not lead exposure
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Of course. Looking at the victim/perpetrator group, one could probably find a correlation with eating oatmeal or riding a bicycle. Bogus study and/or bogus reporting.

Tim
 
It's amazing that we (or our parents) weren't all either shooters or shooting victims back before leaded gasoline, lead-based paint, and lead plumbing were banned and average blood lead levels were about 20 times higher than they are today.
 
"It's amazing that we (or our parents) weren't all either shooters or shooting victims back before leaded gasoline, lead-based paint, and lead plumbing were banned and average blood lead levels were about 20 times higher than they are today."

That's exactly the conclusion I came to while reading the article. I'm probably older than most here so probably have more exposure to lead than some, especially considering I have been casting and shooting lead bullets since 1954. Must be something wrong with me. I have no desire to commit crimes or shoot people. Maybe the lady has an agenda? Ya think?
Paul B.
 
I'll have to do some digging, but there are numerous studies showing a correlation between the elimination of ambient lead (gasoline, paint, etc) and a decline in violent crime across the board in the early 1990's.
 
Crazy me, I was looking at the inverse relationship between the huge increase in the number of criminals locked up and the huge drop in crime at the same time and thought they were related.

It was lead paint all this time. Who knew?
 
Causation is the first thing that people choose to discard as soon as the numbers begin to look favorable.

We can study car wrecks. Write up a table of 1,000 car wrecks and analyze how many people were in the vehicle. I don't know, would it be safer to be in a car with only yourself, or in a bus with forty people?

We start with a known situation. We select a test group. We test for specific things that we want to hear. If we check all cars that are on the road during morning commute, most will be single drivers. On a friday night, might it be two or more? For that example, a 6:00 am monday morning data set might show that over 70% of accidents involved drivers only, and there was not a single school bus hit.

There are a lot of ways we can take that data and work it into what we want, and if we don't get what we want, we can collect other data sets until we get one that supports the desired results.


It seems to be pretty simple. The 'scientists' wanted to prove that poverty caused crime. Since poverty commonly involves old plumbing and old neighborhoods and old paint, poverty can be connected to crime, and lead. After that, we connect lead and poverty to lazy and greedy slumlords that don't fix houses or repaint them, or cities that haven't dug up every last inch of lead pipe. Then, we assume that the people who are thought to be responsible for lead are blamed for the crime, since they forced the little kids to eat the paint chips.

We need to see cause, not connections. Connections are used as a tool to deceive the feeble minded.
 
Once we realized just how much violent crime decreased in the 1990's, there were a bunch of studies. Stretesky's "lead-crime" hypothesis was one of the more frequently-quoted ones.

The Feigenbaum study found:

(...) low-level lead poisoning, especially in the first three years of life, has significant and often measured consequences. Children with high levels of lead in their blood have lower IQs and are more prone to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, impulsivity, and aggression.
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The Clean Air Act caused a 99% drop in ambient lead exposure between 1975 and 1990.

Causality is a hard thing to establish, but the correlation is pretty compelling.
 
I'm fairly sure there is a study somewhere (if not, there ought to be) showing a tremendous decrease in the number of Christians fed to the lions in Roman areas, after the Roman emperors converted to Christianity.

Clearly there is a correlation between Christianity and not feeding people to the lions, for sport, right?

Absolutely!..BUT..well, not exactly...after converting to Christianity, the Roman rulers stopped feeding Christians to the lions. They kept on feeding pagans to the lions for a couple more centuries, until the fall of the Roman Empire. Seems to me that the "Christian" values of the converted Romans didn't end people being lion chow in their arenas, it only changed who they chose as their victim pool.

In science, as in any investigation into the cause of a fault or problem, we look at everything involved, but we only change one thing at a time. When we change only one thing, and get the same/similar result that we had in the beginning, we have a reasonable certainty that one thing wasn't the cause of the fault. Then we change a different thing, and repeat that process until we hit on the one thing (or combination of things) that does give us a different result than we had in the beginning.

Society never changes just ONE thing at a time. Multiple things, up to millions of things change, and any study claiming ONE thing, was the cause, WITHOUT considering equally ALL the other things that changed is flawed to the point of uselessness for any serious rational purpose. It's nothing more than opinion, paid for by someone, and usually reflecting the views of the people paying for the study, or the people doing the study, and not a cause and effect backed with facts, only facts that have a casual relationship, or as the popular phrase today goes, a "correlation".
 
Something else weird about all this. I keep hearing that lead exposure is highest among the impoverished and Black Americans. I wonder if there is anything going on there? Like maybe a crime relationship between those groups?
 
Tom Servo said:
I'll have to do some digging, but there are numerous studies showing a correlation between the elimination of ambient lead (gasoline, paint, etc) and a decline in violent crime across the board in the early 1990's.
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It's a very strong correlation all over the world, childhood lead exposure and violent crime among young adults.

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MTT TL said:
Something else weird about all this. I keep hearing that lead exposure is highest among the impoverished and Black Americans. I wonder if there is anything going on there? Like maybe a crime relationship between those groups?
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Exposure to lead from leaded gasoline affected everyone equally, since that was an airborne pollutant. Leaded gasoline was phased out y 1972, so poisoning today is primarily a relic of leaded paint which remains in older homes. Painted windows in particular, since the lead is exposed and made airborne from friction when the window is raised and lowered. Lead paint was the expensive paint back in the day, so it wasn't working class areas that used it but the wealthy areas. When wealth moved from the cities to the suburbs once wealthy urban areas became the poor inner city, and those old windows are still being used and there's also old paint flaking off the walls. So ironically the lead paint used by the wealthy in days of old now mostly affects the poor today.
 
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