- cross-posted to:
- usnews@lemy.lol
- cross-posted to:
- usnews@lemy.lol
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It’s those lazy millennials. They just don’t have the patience or dedication.
Who has the money or the leave to travel around, book hotels, go on lots of dates and buy power tools,
Boomers: Would you rather eat avocado toast or become a serial killer?
Millennials/GenZ: What the fuck? Uh, I guess I’d rather eat the toast?
Boomers nObOdY WaNts To SerIaL KiLl aNyMoRe!
Millennials are killing the serial killer industry.
oj rollin in his
coffinnissan rn shakin his damn head🍊🥤🧤
It was very famously a white Bronco.
right and I highly doubt he’s in it now. I smile at the one I see at work though :')
Some say he’s still trying to make it to Mexico.
Most serial killers had their own vehicle and house, and were able to keep those despite most killers not being able to hold down a job once they started the murders.
Try doing that today. You can’t methodically kill people if you’re freezing to death on the streets.
These greedy corporations are just saving us from serial killers by making it impossible to become one without financial ruin.
Plot twist. The serial killers still have all that time, but they realized the could kill way more people by becoming billionaires and exploiting them to death.
The rise started before 1950, rose the most rapidly from 1960 to 1970, plateaued in 1980, and then collapsed moving towards 2010.
https://www.ncesc.com/geographic-pedia/at-what-age-do-serial-killers-start-killing/
As previously mentioned, the typical age range for serial killers to start killing is in their late 20s to early 30s.
So figure that the people killing were maybe maybe late 20s to early 30s in late 1950s to 1970, when the numbers were exploding.
That means people born in ~1920 to ~1940; the serial killers probably were mostly born in the interwar period, between World War I and World War II; born in the Roaring Twenties and then the Great Depression.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennials
Going based on the generations there, that would have mostly been the Silent Generation.
The period of rapid increase was only about twenty years long, so it’s really only about the length of one generation (though that doesn’t mean that it need nicely align with the “generational cohorts” thing).
The Boomers were already falling off.
By the time Generation X rolled around, the spike would already have been done.
Millennials were born between 1981 and 1996, long after all this happened.
And one other point – remember that the graph is of absolute, not per-capita numbers. According to it, in 2010, we have numbers in absolute terms comparable to about 1955. But that’s in absolute terms.
https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/1955/
In 1955, the US population was about 106 million. Today, it is 334 million. That is, in per-capita terms, 2010 is somewhat-lower than any period shown on the chart. It’s not just low, it’s lower than it’s ever been.
Now, all that being said, I’m not sure how they measure the number of concurrently-active serial killers. I would imagine that things like the advent of DNA evidence, buildup of fingerprint databases, and other changes in criminology probably have changed things; one might have assumed that a serial killer was responsible for a copycat/similar crime, or perhaps vice versa in different conditions.
The other theory I’ve heard that makes some sense is lead exposure. From 1925 to about 1976, lead was commonly added to gasoline. Lead is known to cause psychological problems including irritablity and general mood disorders.
Pretty much everyone born during that period was exposed to aerosolized lead.
I don’t believe that it’s lead; see my other comment on it. The lead reductions would have come much too late, and the falloff is too sharp.
Going based on the generations there, that would have mostly been the Silent Generation.
It’s always the quiet ones
I was thinking that people returning from WW2 might be a factor, war trauma or something, but that seems like it’s a little too early.
In 1944, this data shows the largest cohorts in an infantry unit being measured being 19-24 years old.
A 19-year-old – the youngest cohort listed – would be 33, maybe the end of the peak period to start serial killing – 14 years after 1944. That’s in 1958, and that’d have been the tail end of American WW2 veterans being in the prime serial killer initiation age. The boom had started then, but the highest rate of increase came later…and that’s looking at the very tail end of the WW2 vets.
The serial killers would mostly have been children or young teens during World War II, not actually served in it.
It might be interesting to see if countries other than the US – and I have no idea if whatever metrics used by the author here can be applied in those countries, might not have the same data available – saw similar changes in serial killer activity, since that’d help let one know if the relevant factors producing the spike were something that the US in particular experienced or not.
Maybe would be serial killers just spree kill in a mass shooting instead…that has certainly grown since Columbine
K
Or massive amounts of lead poisoning
Nah. It’s an industrialized, mass-produced economy now. Before the 90s, killing people was a bespoke trade. Mass murder was a one-on-one kind of transaction, each murder personally crafted for the victim by a specialist. The really industrial scale deaths at the time were the stuff of nation-states.
The transition of mass murders to the private sector as heralded by Atlanta, Waco, Columbine and Oklahoma City coincided¹ with the Clinton admin and the advent of NAFTA, which promoted mass industrialization of heretofore domestic industries².
Ever since, it’s been death dealt on an ever expanding scale on an j cident-by-incident basis. A sort of Moore’s Law of death and disillusionment.
I hate myself for even penning this diatribe, but the situation is so bleak it feels like no depth of dark humor will reallybshock anyone anymore.
–
- Correlation does not imply causation
- This is such a badly formed argument even for satire, I’m embarrassed
I thought it amusing! Keep on keepin’ on OP.
Millennials owning their murder house in this economy?
Back in the day you could afford both med school and running an elaborate murder hotel with some gruesome custom made contraptions. Now you can’t even afford a simple murder house. What has come of this country.
And don’t come telling us that cutting on avocado toast will suddenly enable us to afford a reasonable home with a decent torture basement.
No one wants to ritualistically murder anymore
Be the change you want to see in the world. Go out and kill your entire neighborhood, it’s the patriotic thing to do.
deleted by creator
Lead poisoning is still the prevalent theory, I think. It fucks up brain development in ways that make kids tend to sociopathic personalities.
I’m always glad to hear more people know about lead poisoning. It makes a lot of sense.
I’m curious, you got anything light reading you can recommend to ease into the topic, please pm me. I’d appreciate, if it wasn’t another post which basically recites the content of another post, and so on - far too much out there these days)
No. It’s not possible to find light reading about lead.
Badum Tss
Mythbusters disagrees
It’s called The Lead-Crime Hypothesis, and you can find vetted info on it, here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypothesis?wprov=sfti1).
Here’s a recent meta-analysis: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166046222000667
Society has not yet realized how important it is to clean up this issue. But we’re getting there.
Society has not yet realized how important it is to clean up this issue.
If you’re talking about removing lead from our society, it seems the progress made over the past 40 years has been incredibly dramatic
If you have 15 minutes this Veritasium is well done and explains the history that led to the problem.
Here are a few. Most people think it’s just in the water or lead paint. This first link is about the air.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/07/violent-crime-lead-poisoning-british-export
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-20961241
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6068756/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/08/lead-poisoning-crisis-us-children
If you’ve got Disney+ Cosmos has an entire episode about the history of the discovery of how bad leaded gasoline was
What is the excuse for mass shootings then?
Availability of weapons mixed with infrastructure development that atomizes communities to the point that the only places some people can find any social activity is nihilistic message boards full of psychopaths that actively encourage terroristic attacks on society but in the oblique way that dodges accountability for it when someone actually goes and does it.
- Easy access to guns
- The rise of easy access fascist media
- The dissolution of public institutions
It’s simply too easy to grab a gun by anyone. Military grade equipment is available to pretty much anyone with a credit card. Then you combine that with a CONSTANT beating drum from people like Alex Jones talking about how much they want crush, destroy, kill their enemies and how corrupt everything is. Then also talking about how people need to rise up and do “something”. While also in the same breath telling people to go off their meds and how any sort of treatment for mental disorders is actually poison. Then pair that with the fact that there’s pretty much no public infrastructure around public health (thanks Reagan). That means if you are having some sort of mental break down, depression, whatever, if you can’t afford the $100s/$1000s of dollars to get regular psychiatric treatment you are basically just going to be untreated. There is also pretty much no safe place to recoup for someone in distress but not at risk of suicide. But even if there were, even if you could afford it, fascists and preachers know that mentally healthy people are harder to grift so they spend all their time demonizing the very help you’d need.
However, not everyone that does this is mentally unwell. Some are just hateful fascists that believe killing gets their hate filled messages into the world. It’s why it is irresponsible for any media outlet to publish the name or manifestos of these assholes. Having notorious killers encourages more notorious killers.
As to that first point, you know we had AR-15s in the 70s, right? (No one gave a shit. They weren’t “cool” until the Assault Weapons Ban. Yeah, that didn’t work out so well…)
You know guns were far easier to get back then? LOL, I got an old Mossberg 500 (think classic 12-gauge pump) that was branded Revelation. They sold those at Western Auto stores.
It was no thing to see a dude with a loaded gun rack in his pickup. Point being, access is not the thing that changed.
And the rest of your post? On. The. Money.
As to that first point, you know we had AR-15s in the 70s, right?
The other 2 factors are important along with the internet. There may have been less legal barriers to getting an AR-15, that does not mean accomplishing such a task was easy to do. It’s not like there were AR-15 ads on TV or in newspapers (well, there may have been, but that would have been highly regional). It’s not like every city had an “AR-15” guy in the yellow pages. Legal access hasn’t changed, but general access has (particularly to assault rifles).
Regardless, my advocacy is first just starting with laws I think most everyone can agree with, red flag laws. Take away or don’t allow the purchase of guns by a domestic abusers or someone with a history of violence. Heck, you could even put a time limit on that stuff like “within the last 7 years”.
A ton of these cases are fairly young men (<20). So it would be enough to say “hey, if you are under 25 and your school teachers say ‘Do not let this kid in particular have a gun’” then you don’t get a gun until you turn 25. Or even an outright ban on ownership for people less than 25 (though that’d be much less popular).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/971544/number-k-12-school-shootings-us-age-shooter/
Current gun laws are pretty restricted compared to things that used to be allowed. The big one is mail order guns, you could just send a money order and get pretty much any semi-auto gun you wanted delivered to your house with no background check at all.
Full auto gums required a tax stamp since the 30s, and weren’t banned until 86.
Great explanation. All things we can solve, but choose not too.
Weapons availability and the mental health crisis. In countries without easy access to guns, mass killings are conducted with knives or cars (runovers). And in countries with socialized healthcare that includes mental health, mass killings don’t happen, at all, or very rarely if ever. Socioeconomic inequality is usually the third element, like in the fire triad, mix the three and you get mass shootings.
Shit life syndrome. The difference is they turn their misery outwards instead of committing suicide.
Mass terror attacks way the fuck up though
John Wayne Gacy killed 33 people, that we know of, in his entire life. 21 killed in Uvalde alone.
We just streamlined things.
Why kill them serially, while you can kill them in parallel.
Stupid IT joke, sorry.
67 domestic terrorism attacks by right wing groups in the US from 2017-2022.
Instant Gratification goes pathalogical, and bam now we have mass shooters.
One could argue that it is preferable to serial killers.
Serial killers meticulously plan and often torture their victims extensively and many of their victims families never get closure because nothing gets tied back to the killer.
Mass gunman attacks, for example, kill orders of magnitude faster with much less pain for many of their victims, the perpetrator isn’t active for a long period of time, and the families get closure.
Of two severely fucked up scenarios that happen, it seems that one is worse.
Not really, ETA, IRA, Al Qaeda the Palestinians hijacking planes, Pablo Escobar blowing up planes, Unabomber, Oklahoma City. These are all things of the past.
No… Actually they switched to killing homeless and drug addicts and the police don’t actually investigate them.
… and Indigenous and Black women, who just run away for no reason so aren’t really missing.
But they were existing, menacingly! 😨
I do research and writing for a crime docuseries, and the amount of times sex workers go missing and cops/news don’t care until there’s multiple bodies or a more well known disappearance occurs, is DISGUSTING.
The Poughkeepsie Killer was killing sex workers in broad daylight and was keeping their corpses in his hoarder house attic. The families of Wendy Meyers and Gina Barone went to the press and were told that the cases “weren’t the kind the public cared about”.
Police had the suspect but didn’t pursue the case until 5 women went missing. Why do their lives matter less just because they do a different kind of physical labor for work? Each was someone’s daughter.
This is the truth.
Cops don’t do anything about it around here because they see it as some kind of Dexter situation, it “reduces their workload,” and whatnot.
Way back in my homeless/drug addict days I was chilling with this bigger time cartel dealer guy. Everyone knew that he was definitely a serial killer but his target was always heroin addict girls and I am neither of those. We’re driving around and cops just swarm us. After some questions, they ended up giving him back his gun (he’s a felon) and telling him that their agreement was that he is not to ever leave the more ghetto area of town. They then openly gang stalked us until we went back to that area.
I’m fairly certain that police commonly know exactly who the serial killers are in their area and I think they often times have agreements with them.
Canadian cops from Vancouver ignored Robert Pickton’s serial killing for over 20 years 'cause he targeted prostitutes from the DTES (downtown east side). He fed their bodies to his pigs and finally confessed to 49, convicted of 6 murders.
Toronto cops ignored outcries from the LGBTQI+ community for almost 7 years because Bruce McArthur’s victims were almost all immigrants. The landscaper was finally convicted of 8 murders, hiding the body pieces in large planters on his client’s properties.
lot of comments in here talking about how they’re just doing their kills some other way: cops, mass shootings, not getting caught (this one is the most braindead). But everyone is ignoring how we’ve largely eliminated regular lead exposure that used to be the norm. that shit makes you go fucking insane.
I don’t like the way policing has turned many first world countries into semi-police states … being a person of colour (like me) automatically makes you questionable with the law no matter what you’re doing. I know from experience.
But after saying all that, mass murderers and killers are probably lesser now because of better policing, mass surveillance, intercommunications, mass data collection, profiling, forensic science and monitoring. It’s a lot harder now than in was in the 60s, 70s or 80s for a random stranger to wander from place to place committing murders and not getting caught. It doesn’t mean it’s not possible … it’s just that in our day in age of technology, it’s a lot harder.
Leaded gasoline production and learning about the butterfly room in the lead producing part of the factory was fucking terrifying. That shit was so dangerous to workers.
Not to mention drivers and pedestrians.
What is the butterfly room?
[…] House of Butterflies—a building for tetraethyl lead synthesis—so named because its workers were known for brushing hallucinated insects from their bodies.
Absolutely chilling. The rest of the article is good too. A great example of how championing for positive change, though difficult and frustrating, can have huge huge positive effects. So glad to have heroes like Needleman in the world.
Really scary and sad for workers who were so badly poisoned. Glad we phased it out.
Jesus chrost that is fucked up.
Clair Cameron Patterson should be on the dollar bill.
In the book Freakonomics they made the argument that the sudden decline in crime in the late 90’s appeared to be tied to Roe v. Wade. I wonder if this is similar.
A large percentage of serial killers suffered from childhood abuse and trauma. Kids in the foster system are often abused and traumatized. I can see it.
I thought you were being sarcastic but there is a book called Freakonomics and it does suggest as you said. Check the “Criticism” section for details.
It’s the same quality of scholarship as a Malcolm Gladwell book - namely, none. On the one hand it’s a shame these kinds of books are bestsellers, but I guess it’s good that people are reading books at all. Most of the people I know stopped reading in their mid-20s except for poorly written “news” articles online that can be completed in a couple minutes or less.
Weird most people I know read fiction for fun.
Maybe most written content is written in jest and we just missed the memo? One can dream.
Seems to have been debunked: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/03/21/why-freakonomics-failed-to-transform-economics
Later researchers found a coding error and pointed out that Mr Levitt had used the total number of arrests, which depends on the size of a population, and not the arrest rate, which does not. Others pointed out that the fall in homicide started among women. No-fault divorce, rather than legalised abortion, may have played a bigger role.
Western society was unclear of whether or not making them executives was a good idea to begin with.
I think the lead poisoning theory is a bit overblown, personally. There’s something to it, but “all the serial killers were just brain damaged” is I think trying to put a very neat little bow around a complex package.
I think a lot of it is simply that it’s harder to get away with murder now. I mean not to make it sound too easy but in 1982 there were a lot of ways to kill someone that basically could not be tracked back to you as long as you weren’t literally seen doing it. People aren’t stupid, they know this, and they change their patterns around it.
Additionally, I’m sure that (potentially as a result of this) we have more spree/mass killings now, and a decent deal of spree killings have a component of sexual frustration to them as many serial killers had.
I figure it’s mostly the electronics angle. Your phone, if you have it with you it’s really obvious if you travel to the area crimes happen. Heck, even not using your phone or other connected electronics can indicate something. Your car seen on surveillance cameras which are everywhere, from private home’s doorbells to commercial cameras to municipal roadway cameras. Your internet search history of maybe the victim or the location. Automatic toll payments. You’d have to live an almost completely disconnected life and take serious measures to avoid detection, and even then it’s not a sure thing.
Yep. The Moscow Murders seem to be a good example of this. College student seemingly took a lot of precaution to stab 4 people to death in their rental home, left almost nothing behind, turned his cell phone off during the crime - but he’s still dinged because earlier records show him basically scoping out the house in days prior based off his cell phone location.
I should say it’s not yet stated in a court of law whether this student actually did the killings, and courts do get those decisions wrong - but even still it’s a good example of how technology can track you essentially all the time
I’ve heard this theory as well and it makes a lot of sense. Forensics has improved to the point where evidence is always left behind. If someone is caught after their 2nd murder they don’t spend the next decade escalating, amassing bodies in their crawlspaces.
Agreed. There was a would-be serial killer that popped up in Stockton a year or two ago. Dude would just pop up and shoot someone from out of the shadows. He made it to victim number four before a camera caught him and the cops caught up to him. In 1980, this dude would have been a national fucking terror, but he barely made the local news in 2023.
That’s a pretty solid take.
Now they just do mass shootings.
parallel killers
Interestingly the start of the decline is 1988 which also happens to be the year the seminal Stewart Raffill film Mac and Me was released. Coincidence? I wonder.
mfw
Most crime has declined dramatically since the 90s. And yet right wing media is scaring the shit out of people, saying there are murderers, rapists, and terrorists behind every bush.
The world is actually becoming more empathetic and safer, but some people want us to be scared because fear keeps them in power. Don’t believe them.
Well it is trending up again
Reduction in lead exposure plays a huge part.
The lead generation is currently running the country (that I live in). It shows.
Is there actually any scientific consensus on this, or just conjecture.
Here’s a starting point if you care https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypothesis
Everyone keeps saying that. I didn’t know.
I wonder how many of them just got badges.
They’re just cops now.
Lol yes.
They have joined the military or private military companies since. they can kill as much as they like with complete impunity, in many wars like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine, Palestine and Gaza, plus it’s brown people they are killing so they feel triple the reword, society is fine with that as long as it who they view as the enemy who’s the subject of their carnal instincts.
You can’t convince me that the image of the horrors committed by the IDF in Gaza and the US military aren’t of psychopaths having a blast paid for by their own societies.
I mean. War and soldiers of fortune existed in the 80s so I don’t think that’s exactly why.
Yeah back in the day they could always fight for fucking Rhodesia if they just wanted to kill brown people in war
Be a man among men.
