When I returned to Florida after a trip to Toronto in the early 70s I was gushing to everyone about what a wonderful place it was; modern, dynamic, clean, civilized, progressive, safe. MY mother had a very perceptive observation: "Yes, that's what New York City was like when I was growing up there during the Depression."

The answer is simple, and you guys have been dancing all around it. Murder, all crime, is primarily caused by drugs, the desperation of users who will commit any crime to get it and the greed of the sellers who will commit any crime to control the trade in it. Before drugs became an issue, in the late 60s, the crime rate and murder rate was a lot lower than it is now, just as in some areas, like the rural midwest, drugs came late and the crime rate spiked later. The crime rate was pretty high during Prohibition, too, for the same reason: alcohol was a drug too. Although addiction was not the problem it is now and most of the murder was amongst the criminals themselves. All of these sociological theories about how Americans are more violent or hostile than other people are bogus, America has become violent, and it has happened in my lifetime, I have seen it change before my eyes. It started when the heroin trade was taken over by organized crime, and it got worse when it was taken over from them by smaller, decentralized street gangs and when cocaine moved in.

Sure, there are a lot of other complicating factors; poverty, race, cultural, economic, but those divisions have always existed, especially in this country. Look at Calcutta if you want to see poverty and a cultural melting pot! Countries like Canada are very similar to the US, but they've mitigated the urban crime problem by not having as draconian drug laws, making trafficking less profitable. Canadians aren't nicer than Americans, in fact, in parts of the midwest you can't even tell them apart, at least, until the meth epidemic started. I think the single easiest thing you could do to lower the crime rate is to take the profit out of dope, to give it away free to the junkies (and offer them treatment if they want it). They will no longer need to steal to get drugs and the crooks will lose their market overnight. That is why European drug crimes, and crime rates, are so much lower.

Of course, like any business, the drug lords will adjust, adapt, diversify, open new lines of business, even go legit like they did after the end of Prohibition. But the easy money will be gone. They will be on the defensive. The crime problem will never go back to 50s levels because the crime epidemic itself has bred social conditions which help perpetuate it, but decriminalizing narcotics will turn the corner.

Of course, episodes like the Virginia Tech shootings will continue to happen, I think they are anomalies and no single strategy will make them go away. If a way can be found to to get concealable and military-style firearms off the street, it might lower the severity of the incidents, or their frequency, but they will not go away.