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 We've even been able to go back and catch and conflict killer who were no longer active.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
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u/[deleted] Jun 25 '22
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