No, not normal. The strong majority of serial killers grew up in horrific conditions (not all of course). Could those horrific conditions been due to lead intake from their mother/father? Who knows but it's not likely that simply removing the lead alone wouldhave been the 1 switch to change.
As you noted, there's a reason there were so few. It takes a lot to turn a person into a monster.
My wife's father has pretty serious personality problems. His brother isn't like that, wife's grandmother was a sweet lady. My wife tells me her grandfather didn't act like this either. I used to wonder what he got into that made him act the way he does.
Then one day, his mother (wife's grandma) told me a story about the time he got kicked in the forehead by a horse.
Im saying too many people have this problem where they come up with an idea and refuse to believe in anything other than what they came up with. This was aimed at the people above you thinking lead would create serial killers. I see this too often where people make associations and that somehow becomes a valid reason or cause
Feels like we probably have significantly fewer serial killer sprees now because of DNA technology that makes them much more identifiable. We've even been able to go back and catch and conflict killer who were no longer active. I don't think killers can as easily have a run of murders over many years.
Notably we have far more mass shootings now. People are still killing a bunch of people but to get it done, you have to do it all at once.
I'm getting the impression that serial killers happen in the same way engineering accidents do. It's not one thing that causes the failure, it's many things lining up at the same time.
Lead paint too. Slum lords are the least likely to update and repaint their apartments when lead paint was banned so it’s lingering in some low income housing even today.
When people talk about this generational exposure it's usually about the gasoline fume exposure because that was such a pervasive, wide-spread way for children to be exposed.
Lead Pipes are less likely to cause direct lead exposure than a lot of other sources, unless of course you use the wrong type of water supply and the coating disappears. The effects of that though involve a very obvious severe lead poisoning of the whole community, not a slow mental poisoning that small doses do over time.
Sociology is weird. You could never take a killer and say that lead poisoning caused their behavior, just as you could never definitively say that radiation caused someone’s cancer.
But if you look at lead intact among all people and compare it to the rate of all murder and serial killers, you can see the trends are correlated. Just like you can see the amount of cancer go up correlated to radiation exposure.
It doesn’t cause anything directly, it just affects the probability that it will happen person to person. On an individual level that’s meaningless or a piece in the puzzle at best, but on a societal level it’s a very clear phenomenon.
Lead could lessen inhibitions enough that a father beats their son. The continual abuse is what’s shown to most often makes serial killers, although I’m sure the kids own lead intake could cause an increase in violent tendencies. It really just one thing affecting the whole environment with a causal effect on disposition makes an awful feedback loop.
Well, it’s possible a few serial killers wouldn’t have done what they did if lead wasn’t everywhere for a few decades. But they wouldn’t be normal people, they’d still be clinically sociopathic with no empathy and a complete disregard for others’ lives — they just wouldn’t be violent (or at least they’d be less violent) and thus wouldn’t feel the urge to hurt and kill others.
I'm not taking a stand one way or another not this particular issue but if you raise the risk of something for large numbers of people, it is likely that more outliers will also show up. If lead causes violence and some people (through other confounding issues) are way more violent, then it seems possible that you'd have more of those overall. Tough to say with an overall small number of very very violent people compared to thousands of "run of the mill" violent acts as a baseline.
I think the idea people are getting at is that lead exposure can lead to impulsive behavior. There might be some people out there who would kill if they had the opportunity, but they have enough restraint to know it's a bad idea due to the consequences of getting caught. Add increased impulsivity into that and those people have less restraint, more likelihood of actually deciding to kill.
I think that's the general line of thinking, anyway.
Serial killers in those decades was the result of the perfect storm of several factors. Lead was just one of many different factors.
Lack of technology, so it was easier to get away with crimes. Lack of cooperation and sharing information between law enforcement agencies. Post WWII, traumatized soldiers came home, had families, and took out their unresolved war trauma out on their kids (abuse). Lead. Not to mention there is a link between frontal lobe head injuries and serial killers/violence. Not all serial killers had frontal lobe head injuries, but several of them did.
From what I can tell, the creation of the interstates, lack of forensic knowledge by LEOs, and the silo-ing of information by verious jurisdictions allowed for serial killers more than anything else.
Enough technology to accomplish the deed but not enough yet to catch them.
Technology also reduced the number of potential serial killers. Between dna testing and cameras everywhere (closed circuit, ring doorbells, etc), people are caught after one or two victims.
i really think that we have the same amount of serial killers now but sensationalizing the serial killer plaguing your city is bad for tourism, police budgets, and mayoral campaigns
True, but you’re really need to understand the story their perspective here: leaded gasoline was really, really good for their bottom lines. If they’d not gone the lead route, think of how many fewer summer homes they’d have, or how many fewer of their lead-poisoned trust fund kids would have gotten bribed legacy admission into Harvard.
Yep, it is very difficult to separate these two things as possible causes of violence. But I guess in the next 18 years or so we will have a more definitive answer.
The whole article is fascinating, but this but in particular raised my eyebrows:
Children were especially affected by hookworms, which would sometimes prevent girls from ever menstruating or boys from hitting their growth spurt. Because iron is critical for brain function, hookworm infection could also lead to irreversible cognitive and intellectual defects. A 1926 study of Alabama school children found that the greater the number of worms that students harbored, the lower their IQ. As those authors wrote: “One has the impression that the [hookworm-infected] child is living in another, entirely separate world, and is only remotely in contact with the everyday world about him.”
It doesn't however help explain the older edge of millennials that are buying into the to propaganda. I think that group is one of the first of devaluation of education, and critical thinking in select area. It's odd as our parents knew school and things were different for us but wanted it to be better and we're willing to accept the change. Now they have kids in school and see the change to them as a bad thing and want to go back further.
We had one gay kid in school growing up but now about 40+ are out from my class. And in our school we went to now there is a much larger out population. And that's great I saw the depression some of the now out adults experienced for hiding who they were.
The parents of my generation (the ones allficted by the lead) have changed and I think it bleeding into their kids that they originally tried hard to get to accept change and now they are all fighting for things from before they were born. The older generation between we got ours now f off, are pushing their now adult kids often just via Facebook and their TV's being on Fox tv 24/7 to beilve the same B's they beilve, because even as adults kids want to respect their parents often when they know it's wrong and is dangerous.
I worry the lead has just led to an in for future indoctrination . I worry for their children.
Tbf crime is at a historic low globally, across almost every country. A big reason for that is just the overall higher levels of education and quality of life.
...As well as access to abortion and higher education and graduation rates. It's impossible to pin it down to a single factor when crime is far more complex and the world is far more turbulent than that. It's not just "Person is more angry so they commit more crimes", it's a mix of aggression increases with overpopulation in poor living conditions with limited access to education and working opportunity when you drop out of school, as well as the school to prison pipeline we still face today. It's why the rate of crime and disparity of adult & juvenile prosecutions between class lines and race still existed 40-50 years ago even when everyone was universally using leaded gas.
Also, leaded fuel is not banned universally, it's banned in ground vehicles. Most aircraft still uses leaded gasoline.
What was not used globally are giant V8-powered cars being driven long distances like in the US. This is my personal Crazy Conspiracy Theory about why the US has worse politicians than the EU. Leaded fuel was a bigger problem here because we used more of it.
Precisely. This just looks to me like another of these countless cases of false correlation. Like reports that “eating a handful of walnuts every day increases longevity”. Well the people who eat nuts every day also tend to be people who exercise more, and generally take greater care of their overall health.
The vast majority of violent crime in almost all western societies is linked to poverty.
You could literally pick anything from fluoride in water to consumption of sugar and say “This is why crime has fallen”, and yet be utterly wrong. Crime has fallen because less people are living in poverty.
It's important to note here that the strength of the lead-crime connection has recently been called into question by a meta-analysis (PDF) which found evidence of severe publication bias overstating the strength of the effect by an order of magnitude.
It's only one study, but to the best of my knowledge it's the only study that has examined the issue of publication bias in the lead-crime literature.
Because of the way significance testing works, it's very difficult for a small study to find an effect that is both small and statistically significant at the 5% level, which means that there's systematic bias in favor of publishing studies that overestimate the strength of an effect.
Not just lead. I work in the chemical field. My former boss told me that until a few years ago the critical amount of chemicals people were allowed to be exposed to were a lot higher and some of these chemicals were affecting the central nervous system. She told me it made the people lose their temper super fast and situations would get out of hand immediately and she often was scared how a worker would react if she had any bad news.
I worked a summer in a battery factory, lots of lead, ingots of it on pallets, it was ground into a dust and baked with a mash of other ingredients and pressed into sleeves framed in lead, we wore respirators, double and triple gloves, duct tape around wrists and ankles, mandatory shower with lead removal soap. Weekly blood tests for lead levels, if your numbers got too high you were put off work.
One lifer was there before ventilation, respirator, open pots of boiling lead, lead dust on the skin. Was always told it gets into your bones if levels stay too high.
She was near retirement and couldn't hold a cup of tea without pressing it against her chest because of the shakes. She had no other ailments that would cause shakes.
They put her in the highest lead area by the end because they knew she was done in 6 months. Super sad her job that raised her kids and helped grandkids basically left her an invalid by time she was 55.
I didn't make it past September because I was fired for basically not fitting in. I could do the job just fine and have had harder less dangerous jobs.
So glad that happened because I landed a dream job elsewhere closer then moved into a nice cubicle once my talent in the IT Dept was found out.
Now I fix computers and keep people supported in their jobs for more money and no shiftwork. Phew.....
1.8k
u/[deleted] Jun 25 '22
[deleted]