Wasn't a substantial amount of lead used to solder tinned food for like 150 years? That's like two generations where lead leeched into foods. Was there a bump in serial killers from 1810's onward?
fho · 4m ago
150 years is more like 5-7 generations.
vinnski · 2h ago
The headline reminds me of the (debunked) theory that ergot-contaminated grain was what incited the Salem witch trials - which was just as ridiculous
Tetraethyllead was introduced into gasoline in 1922, and lasted about 70 years. The effect would have been greater after WW2 due to there were more cars and a larger population with greater desire for mobility and closer proximity to cars.
During the Depression there were fewer cars for economic reasons, and during WW2 fewer for reasons of rationing and recycling, raw material went to the war effort.
xattt · 1h ago
Lead may not have had as strong of an effect on adults as it did on developing brains. Post-war timelines fit for baby boomers, as they would be in young adulthood at the peak of these crimes.
Spooky23 · 2h ago
My vote: yes. Things like policing are reactive controls.
Crime has been dropping for a long time, and it isn’t because of increased professionalism and effectiveness of police or better governance.
nurettin · 59m ago
And definitely not because there is better access to education and basic resources.
lvl155 · 1h ago
I think it’s safe to say the boomers were exposed to lead the most out of anyone especially if they grew up in heavy traffic areas. That said, that’s no excuse since the Romans were probably exposed at a significantly higher rate and they churned out some ingenious projects. Or was lead introduced to Rome toward tail end?
encom · 2h ago
Betteridge’s Law applies here.
fasteo · 2h ago
The law: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
jama211 · 2h ago
Very much so, and even though the article answers its own question with a no, they know many people will read the headline and only remember the link, and rumour will spread.
I can’t believe we’re _still_ allowing headlines like this in this day and age. I might even report it, because even though technically speaking the article content doesn’t spread misinformation, the title does.
gbin · 2h ago
This made me chuckle have you seen the YouTube titles and thumbs?
It is getting SO outrageous that some creators shadow their own channels with the same videos but with normal titles saying they need the main channel with the stupid titles "for the algorithm".
This is the end of the race to the bottom to grab the scraps of our attention.
mrkramer · 2h ago
But what is alternative to titles and thumbnails?
neallindsay · 1h ago
By following the work of authors that you trust and getting recommendations from people you trust, you can reduce your need for recommendations from machines and companies. Then you won't need to rely on clickbait images and headlines to decide if you want to read or watch something.
This requires effort, so it's not free, but I think it's a better way to engage with media.
mrkramer · 53m ago
But that doesn't scale or it does, oldschool Facebook was like that before algorithmic feed took over. Enshittification is real.
yieldcrv · 2h ago
I saw a court case where a mom testified against her adult child and said she drank while she was pregnant, resulting in undermining all of the child defendants decision making process resulting in the defendant’s conviction
To be honest this felt like one of those “too poor for appeal’s court” things
But a ridiculous way of treating a defendant
Imagine if we could tell someone had a mental alteration
graemep · 2h ago
> I saw a court case where a mom testified against her adult child and said she drank while she was pregnant
How could that even be relevant to a criminal case?
Someone having drunk while pregnant is not strong evidence that it had a meaningful impact. You have to drink heavily to even risk it, and to have an impact on a court case why not get medical evidence on whether or not meaningful damage has occurred.
perihelions · 1h ago
To reemphasize the parent's question, how is that relevant to the prosecution of a criminal trial? "The defendant is mentally ill / has a propensity to commit crimes" isn't admissible, in general.
mentally ill is a plea and changes how the case is handled. if found guilty you go to a very different prison system where real doctors care for your issuse and then releas you when treated. It isn't easy to get this plea - many try thinking it is a fast track out of prison so the courts are onto that and put a lot of effort into checking if you really are. I doubt mom's testimony has much weight in that, though she would still be allowed to testify and that would be in the record maving it apear that it mattered
PeterStuer · 1h ago
In Europe lead was used just as much in pipes and exhaust. We also have countries with broad gun availability.
We do not have the serial killers of the US level by far.
I think culture is key.
hackyhacky · 1h ago
True, but Europe does show a decline in crime in a time period corresponding to the banning of leaded gasoline.
Not everyone agrees that lead did cause a drop in violence. It’s one theory
hackyhacky · 57m ago
> Not everyone agrees that lead did cause a drop in violence. It’s one theory
Obviously. That's what we're discussing. I am simply presenting evidence to contradict the GP comment, which claims (falsely) that Europe did not see a drop in crime similar to the US's. The fact that Europe did see a drop a crime is not conclusive evidence of the lead-crime theory, but it leaves that possibility open.
If you have another theory, you are welcome to share it.
firesteelrain · 55m ago
Not completely ruling lead out.
The decline in crime across both the US and Europe does align with the phaseout of lead.
Other things were happening at the same time such as changes in policing, incarceration, economic conditions, and access to mental health care.
It is hard to know how much each carries in weight.
SideburnsOfDoom · 1h ago
This isn't a really counter-argument.
It could be (and IMHO likely is) multi-causal, with several contributing factors, including lack of social welfare (leading to people with rough childhoods), gun availability and also lead exposure in childhood.
The question at hand is how to weight the last factor. IMHO it's not zero, but I don't know enough to say just how much.
firesteelrain · 1h ago
You are right it is multi casual.
The hard part is untangling how much each factor contributes.
ltbarcly3 · 1h ago
This is not accurate at all even as an apples to apples claim. US media amplifies them and you consume a lot of US media. Besides confounding factors, you have had a ton of fascist and communist governments which were filled to the gills with serial killers and frankly mass murderers, all the way up to the 2000s. They just had a legal outlet to act within. The % of europeans who have killed more than 10 civilians must be 1000x the US average over the last 100 years.
martin_a · 1h ago
> The % of europeans who have killed more than 10 civilians must be 1000x the US average over the last 100 years.
I think that the parent is also including soldiers in times of war in Europe in the 20th century.
It's still utter WTFery, but not on the basis of comparing mass shootings by civilians.
PeterStuer · 1h ago
You mean the only country that has 800+ military bases around the world, and has started a never ending series of 'regime change' wars and proxy wars, is the only country to have used nukes, that has a military larger than the rest of the planet combined, and an extreme domestic mass shooting problem seen nowhere else, somehow still managed to have 1000x less 10+ kills than Europe?
firesteelrain · 1h ago
The conversation was about serial killers and individual level violence, not military actions or geopolitical power.
PeterStuer · 47m ago
The parent for this response was specifically about state sactioned, military or otherwise, killings.
firesteelrain · 43m ago
Slightly. I think you are misreading the parent. Parent is saying that serial killers had a legal outlet to operate in. Then, you went a completely different direction with military level operations which parent isn’t talking about. Parent is arguing that in those communist or facist governments that they basically had state sanctioned serial killers and psychopaths
hackyhacky · 1h ago
First, what you're describing is not consistent with the definition of serial killer [1].
Second, even if we include governmental killings, it's not clear how to allocate blame. For example, how many people are responsible for the Holodomor [2]? Just Joseph Stalin himself? His deputies? Every employee of the Russian government? If we consider each instance of state-sanctioned murder as ultimately being ordered by the head of state, that would not greatly increase the number of murderers, and certainly not in comparison to the daily count of civilian-on-civilian murder in the US.
Third, if we are going to include governmental killings, we should definitely include the various illegal wars that the US has engaged in, and continues to engage in. I think that would nicely balance the tables. It's important to understand that fascism and Communism do not hold a monopoly on civilian deaths [3] [4] [5]. Let's also not forget the US's continued use of the death penalty.
Pickleball was invented in Washington too. Probably another side effect of lead exposure and breathing in leaded gasoline fumes. Or at least, that's what tennis players like to believe :)
zer00eyz · 2h ago
I can't remember the last time I went out of my way to look at who authored something because I disliked it on a visceral level.
The writing here goes from too much punctuation to grad students book review to quasi political rant. And the criticism might be valid but I simply can't get past the horrid delivery.
Prelapsarian... yay I learned a new word. It did not help with the delivery of the conclusion.
nanis · 1h ago
> too much punctuation
I thought you were joking. ... After a while, I started expecting a comma after each and every word.
devmap · 1h ago
“Critics had long disdained the appetite for sanguinary entertainment as a symptom of decadence.”
mrkramer · 2h ago
Perhaps but I would argue that the most likely reason is genetics plus traumatic childhood. Manson had traumatic childhood; living on the streets, committing crime and spending half of his life in prison and in state institutions. When you add drugs and hippie flower power music scene to that you get Manson.
Bundy also had traumatic childhood not knowing who his real father is and believing his mother is his older sister while being raised by his grandparents. He was violent sex addict always craving for more and more. Imo his genetics played the key part in his deviant violent behavior.
dlisboa · 1h ago
I’ve watched movies on and read about countless serial killers. Almost always they came from horrible families, with abuse, neglect, different types of punishment. Also it seems there never is any type of psychological follow up of them as kids when they started to act “weird”. So most are just forgotten people who were never looked at mentally. At least I the 70s, I don’t know today.
I think there a couple cases where that’s not true but rare exceptions.
mrkramer · 58m ago
For example John Wayne Gacy underwent psychiatric evaluation and "Two doctors concluded he had an antisocial personality disorder (the clinical term for sociopathy and/or psychopathy), was unlikely to benefit from treatment, and that his behavior pattern was likely to bring him into repeated conflict with society. The doctors concluded Gacy was mentally competent to stand trial[0]."
After that he was granted parole and released from prison and in the following years he murdered more than 30 young boys. So yea, the system failed us all. Although it is hard to evaluate and predict who will turn out to be maniac killer out of thousands and thousands of psychiatric cases health system deals with.
Gacy is a good example of failure of the judicial system. He also came from a broken family and his father was violent and drunk. He was imprisoned but homosexual sex crimes weren’t taken seriously even against minors. This allowed him to leave prison with almost no time served. I wouldn’t blame the psychiatrists here.
We see that same pattern with Dahmer where the police literally released one of his victims into his custody and joked about the young teen being Dahmer’s “boyfriend”.
Y_Y · 1h ago
I'd be careful about associating a genetic cause with high-level behaviors. I don't have a good argument either way, but it seems to come close to a political third rail where you can ascribe patterns of behavior to genetically defined(-ish) groups like "race".
mrkramer · 1h ago
It's not about race, it is about personality, even cats have different personalities which are shaped by their genes[0].
Evolution uses variation so you can adapt and survive but variation is experimental meaning its results are nor perfect nor conclusive.
I'm always suspicious of people who advocate this kind of caution - I can never trust if you are saying or withholding information in case it might lead to outcomes you don't like. Reality should take precedence. If X does Y, let's find out how to help X, not pretend X doesn't exist.
Y_Y · 52m ago
You may have misunderstood, I'm advocating caution on the basis that naive discussion of this kind of topic can attract attention from people who associate it with outcomes they don't like, and specifically you can end up being accused of having an ulterior motive
But maybe you underood that and think I'm arguing in bad faith. From your perspective, that may well appear to be the case, I don't think I can demonstrate otherwise.
nkrisc · 1h ago
Because it's rarely ever as simple as X causes Y, yet it will be taken out of context and concluded out of context that X in fact causes Y, thus we must round up everyone exhibiting X to prevent Y.
https://salemwitchmuseum.com/2023/05/17/debunking-the-moldy-...
During the Depression there were fewer cars for economic reasons, and during WW2 fewer for reasons of rationing and recycling, raw material went to the war effort.
Crime has been dropping for a long time, and it isn’t because of increased professionalism and effectiveness of police or better governance.
I can’t believe we’re _still_ allowing headlines like this in this day and age. I might even report it, because even though technically speaking the article content doesn’t spread misinformation, the title does.
It is getting SO outrageous that some creators shadow their own channels with the same videos but with normal titles saying they need the main channel with the stupid titles "for the algorithm".
This is the end of the race to the bottom to grab the scraps of our attention.
This requires effort, so it's not free, but I think it's a better way to engage with media.
To be honest this felt like one of those “too poor for appeal’s court” things
But a ridiculous way of treating a defendant
Imagine if we could tell someone had a mental alteration
How could that even be relevant to a criminal case?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_evidence#Criminal_tr...
We do not have the serial killers of the US level by far.
I think culture is key.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le...
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/02/violent-crime...
Obviously. That's what we're discussing. I am simply presenting evidence to contradict the GP comment, which claims (falsely) that Europe did not see a drop in crime similar to the US's. The fact that Europe did see a drop a crime is not conclusive evidence of the lead-crime theory, but it leaves that possibility open.
If you have another theory, you are welcome to share it.
The decline in crime across both the US and Europe does align with the phaseout of lead.
Other things were happening at the same time such as changes in policing, incarceration, economic conditions, and access to mental health care.
It is hard to know how much each carries in weight.
It could be (and IMHO likely is) multi-causal, with several contributing factors, including lack of social welfare (leading to people with rough childhoods), gun availability and also lead exposure in childhood.
The question at hand is how to weight the last factor. IMHO it's not zero, but I don't know enough to say just how much.
The hard part is untangling how much each factor contributes.
WTF did I just read?
Anyways, maybe have a look at this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...
It's still utter WTFery, but not on the basis of comparing mass shootings by civilians.
Second, even if we include governmental killings, it's not clear how to allocate blame. For example, how many people are responsible for the Holodomor [2]? Just Joseph Stalin himself? His deputies? Every employee of the Russian government? If we consider each instance of state-sanctioned murder as ultimately being ordered by the head of state, that would not greatly increase the number of murderers, and certainly not in comparison to the daily count of civilian-on-civilian murder in the US.
Third, if we are going to include governmental killings, we should definitely include the various illegal wars that the US has engaged in, and continues to engage in. I think that would nicely balance the tables. It's important to understand that fascism and Communism do not hold a monopoly on civilian deaths [3] [4] [5]. Let's also not forget the US's continued use of the death penalty.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_killer
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freedom_Deal
EDIT: formatting
The writing here goes from too much punctuation to grad students book review to quasi political rant. And the criticism might be valid but I simply can't get past the horrid delivery.
Prelapsarian... yay I learned a new word. It did not help with the delivery of the conclusion.
I thought you were joking. ... After a while, I started expecting a comma after each and every word.
Bundy also had traumatic childhood not knowing who his real father is and believing his mother is his older sister while being raised by his grandparents. He was violent sex addict always craving for more and more. Imo his genetics played the key part in his deviant violent behavior.
I think there a couple cases where that’s not true but rare exceptions.
After that he was granted parole and released from prison and in the following years he murdered more than 30 young boys. So yea, the system failed us all. Although it is hard to evaluate and predict who will turn out to be maniac killer out of thousands and thousands of psychiatric cases health system deals with.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne_Gacy#:~:text=Two%20...
We see that same pattern with Dahmer where the police literally released one of his victims into his custody and joked about the young teen being Dahmer’s “boyfriend”.
Evolution uses variation so you can adapt and survive but variation is experimental meaning its results are nor perfect nor conclusive.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250626-how-loud-a-cat-m...
This article was on HN frontpage 2 days ago.
But maybe you underood that and think I'm arguing in bad faith. From your perspective, that may well appear to be the case, I don't think I can demonstrate otherwise.