The Latest Fad

Apparently there is no correlation between single motherhood and homicide. [Read]

"Scapegoated"?  Gee, no agenda there.

And progressive "Authorized Journalists" are happy to jump on the bandwagon.

See?

Well hell, some sociology professor said it, I believe it, that settles it.

Except the graph seems to assume a specific demographic enjoys co-equal credit for a trend, no?  On the flip side, the same ideologues like to point out America is the most "violent industrialized nation" or some other line of bilge as if there aren't millions and millions of peaceable gun owners who get along just fine, thank you, with lower crime rates than those in "gun-free" Japan, and that it's from some concentrated populations where the majority of the problems emanate from.

What I don't see is the percentage of people convicted of violent crimes correlated with those who come from either broken homes or homes that were never whole in the first place.  And it also seems extremely simplistic to draw any conclusions from such a narrow data set that--and one that does not account for changing conditions and effects years down the road.

Before drawing any, I'd like to see someone do a serious correlation of high violent crime areas and low ones, and factor in, among other things (like government subsidization), the single female head of household demographic. Not that I'm representing myself as a competent statistician or the following example as the final word, but I would like to see someone who is address this on a larger scale: Take a low violent crime rate city and a high violent crime rate city.  Now look at the percentage of single female parent households.

Case in point, I did a post some years back using the 2000 census to compare that metric in relativley low-crime Seattle to relatively high-crime Milwaukee, and observed:

Just look at the comparison between "female householders, no husband present" (8.09% vs. 21.07%). 

Lather, rinse, repeat. Does anyone really think there's no correlation?

Sure, there are plenty of other factors, including income, education, relative population ages, race, etc., and no one is saying just having "a man" around is the answer--unless he is a good and caring man. But all of these considerations are why you need someone who knows how to identify and crunch all the right numbers to come up with  models that can best approximate the reality.

And that's why everybody jumping on this latest bandwagon is not only wrong, but those doing it know it is, and they're manipulating opinion to advance an agenda.  Because, ultimately, what they really want to do is keep us from looking at the impact of policies they espouse on populations most directly affected by and responsive to a continuing history of destructive government policies.

That way, they can keep on keepin' on the road to collectivism, and growing the dependency vote. 

I'd like to see somebody like John Lott take this topic on.