>>I'm also reading/hearing that there are more and more vicious types
>>of attacks on humans by young and younger people, many of them fatal
>>for the victims.
>
>Careful! Statistical studies have shown that this is unlikely to be
>true, with youth violence in fact having DROPPED in the past decade or
>so, and in any case not being out-of-bounds compared to most of our
>nation's history.


Hmmm. I never heard of any schools being sprayed with bullets when
I was in school. Have you heard about Columbine ?

>Even gang violence is just a shawdow of what it was in, say, the 1920s
>during prohibition.


Yes, I know about Al Capone. Do you know about the bloods and the
cripps and their ilk ?

>The most dangerous period, from the point of homicidal violence, at
>least, in our history was most likely the late 1800s in the west. Young
>men in the West often did die violent deaths, comparable to what we see
>in the ghetto today, with law enforcement equally ineffective (and often
>equally responsible for violence itself).


Must be advertising I'm hearing about the Green River or other serial
killers .....

>And, of course, the western frontier shared a common attribute with today's
>society - free and ready access to guns, meaning that a relatively high
>percentage
>of violent acts end in death for one or more of the parties involved.
>
>The myth of increased violence among youth has been promulgated in order
>to scare people into passing harsher laws that mostly are used to lock up
>non-violent offenders (nearly 50% for what two decades ago would be
considered
>minor drug offenses - I personally know a guy who did 18 months for growing
>two pot plants in housing at the Malheur Field Station, a private
foundation
>but on National Wildlife Refuge land, thus making it possible to try him
>under federal rather than Oregon law [under Oregon law he's probably have
>just gotten a citation, at the very worst a misdemeanor and fine]).

>- Don Baccus, Portland OR <dhogaza at pacifier.com>


Or perhaps Portland is still safer than other major cities ? My
neighborhood
is relatively quiet except for the above mentioned stalkers, gangs, crack
houses, McDonald's snipers, "disgruntled postal employees", road rage
shooters, and serial killers. Oops, forgot to mention the child molesters
......
Hmmmm again - guess that's why animals and birds don't attack humans -
yet - they haven't lowered themselves to our level .....