U Down wit O-O-P?

What a way for the author to redeem himself with chapter five! I do not know what happened with chapter four with all the numbers and things, but I guess he too saw it was not his greatest chapter and reverted back to his old self.

I definitely enjoyed reading this chapter and could relate to it...not because I am a parent, but because I am a child of an obsessive parent...my DAD...and it seems like it is only getting worse over the years. Everything he hears on television, he wants me to do. They could say "studies found that taking five vitamins a day is good for your health," he wants me to take vitamins everyday, or that "drinking 10 cups of eggs will build strong bones and character," and guess what - he wants me to drink the eggs too (:()...I say that now, at the age that I am, where I am not as helpless as a newborn, my dad is doing it more out of love than fear...and I guess I am alright with that....

But aside from my personal life and back to the chapter...What Makes a Perfect Parent? I read some really interesting things...especially about being bad assessors of hazards....i believe the correct term was terrible risk assessors....and they gave an example about 8 year old Molly's parents not wanting her to go to one friend's house because their parent owned a gun but would let her go to another friend's house who had a swimming pool. This became interesting once they gave the statistics:

In a given year, there is one drowning of a child for every 11,000 residential pools in the United States. In a country with 6 million pools, roughly 550 children under the age of ten drown each year. Meanwhile, there is 1 child killed by a gun for every 1 million plus guns. In a country with an estimated 200 million guns, this means that roughly 175 children under ten die each year from guns. The likelihood of death by pool (1 in 11,000) versus death by gun (1 in 1 million-plus) isn't even close: [Therefore] Molly is more likely to die in a swimming accident than in gun-play, yet her parents would rather her at the friend's house with the swimming pool then with the gun!

TBC...

Q: Where Have All The Criminals Gone? A: The Clinic Trash Can.

For some reason, I just could not get into this chapter, Where Have All The Criminals Gone? which explains such the long delay in my blogging. I don't know, maybe it was because I'm not feeling well...um...no...uh it is definitely because the author for some reason decided to change lanes from his typical, laid back, easy to listen to self, into someone extremely technical, who wanted to throw a whole bunch of numbers and statistics at me that I could not comprehend. Okay so the comprehension wasn't that bad, but I was not used to this coming from him, so it was hard to stay focused on what he was trying to tell me. I mean one minute he was talking about increase number of police on the street, and a whole bunch of figures, then he jumped to good policing strategies, then gave me more numbers to think about, and then tougher gun control, I mean he was just all over the place with this one, and all the numbers he was filling my head up with was not making it any easier to follow him.

Fortunately for me, well him, I was able to stay attentive long enough to catch the beginnings and endings of what he was saying, to get the gist of what the chapter was about, and the purpose of it all. Abortion (in theory) had a significant impact on the rate at which the number of crimes had fallen in the United States. He said, when abortion was made legal after Roe. v Wade, the women who did not want children were able to receive abortions therefore not bringing a child into the world where they would be forced to grow up miserable due to having to live with a mother who resented them. In turn, no child had to grow up unwanted, poor, and struggling, which are the main ingredients for future criminals, which is why crime fell. With him, on this, I concur. Look at Romania, when Nicolae Ceausescu banned abortion to increase the population of Romania. Women were forced to have children that they did not want, and the children grew up living miserable, criminal lives. These children who were born after the ban, hated Ceausescu, and when Ceausescu met his violent death, a great part of it was because of the youth who wanted him dead, a great number or whom, were it not for his abortion ban, would never have been born at all.

[To go off topic a little bit, I just want to say that I was completely shocked about the Menstrual Police and the "celibacy tax"! The first thing that came to mind when I read that was WOW, what an invasion of privacy.]

But back to abortion = dropping crime rates, I think it's mere coincidence that when abortion was legalized, crime fell. I think with a little less numbers in the other parts of the chapter and more statistics about abortion and how it helped crime to fall would have made this theory a lot more concrete.

All in all, the read was a little dry, but he did an excellent job of tying the beginnings and ends of the chapter together. I just have one question though. He said that abortion [again in theory] helped crime to fall significantly, but did it really, because isn't ABORTION NOT A CRIME IN ITSELF??? [I mean it's just a question.]