Broken Prom Date Leads To Stabbing

Overall, crime rates have declined significantly since Colonial times. That decline has continued through the years, except for a significant rise after 1963. However, since the 1970s, the rates have been declining once again, and are now about what they were in the early 1960s. Throughout history, each generation has believed the succeeding generation to be out of control, but the numbers don't show that. I think that, today, we tend to believe that crime is rampant because we hear about it whenever someone commits a crime anywhere in the country, or world, for that matter. School shootings have been up since the 1990s but this may, in part, be attributed to the fact that there was no national database separating school shootings from other shootings until then, and to the fact that early school shootings were only counted when there were deaths, whereas several recorded school shootings in the past couple of decades involved no deaths, and some did not even result in an injury. In the 1900s, those would not have been recorded. Without attributing cause and effect, I will point out that there were fewer school shootings when it was commonplace for children to bring guns to school, and that several of the earlier school shootings involved teachers shooting students. Generally, I think we believe that crime is higher now because we're more apt to hear about it now, whether or not it occurs within our own neighborhood.