In 1994, I had a Super Nintendo Entertainment System. In the summer, it wasn’t enough to captivate a boy for a day. I was constantly coming in and out to play because whatever was outside often offered a better alternative. You really had to be a nerd back then to spend a whole day playing video games. Most families didn’t have a computer, either.
By the time the more advanced generations of hardware came out, I was trying to do things with my life that didn’t really allow for investing much time or resources into gaming. Many millennial and Gen X guys have similar stories on such matters.
I’m not anti-gaming. The last time I really played a lot was when I was put under a monitored quarantine by a foreign government last year. Two weeks of playing games without going anywhere left me wondering how anybody could make that a lifestyle. I went pretty squirrely, while the younger guys I know who did it said they had no problem at all.
My point here was that in 1994, a landmark crime bill was passed with super predator as the buzzword. Things weren’t so woke back then, but you still couldn’t call a spade a spade. Still, everybody knew who it described.
The rationale was also clear: A low IQ, future time orientation, and impulse control issues combined with dysfunctional families and toxic culture was creating one-man crime waves that needed to be stopped as soon as they got underway. If you’re committing appalling violence in your early teens, the ensuing years don’t bode well for everybody else. You might have a sob story, but this is about our safety. Biden was rather eloquent about that one:
The prediction at the time was that crime would get dramatically worse in the years to come. It didn’t, and the official narrative is now that racism was behind the false forecast:
First of all, the legislation cracked down on the super predators, nipping their crime sprees in the bud. Second, the ways that young men spent their time started evolving dramatically. They began gaining access to engrossing video games, unlimited free pornography, and marijuana. This is a recipe for keeping them indoors. I’d argue that’s a much better explanation for the hockey stick graph that never happened rather than the inability of race realism to make accurate predictions.
Guys used to spend more of their time outside doing stuff because that’s where the stuff was to do, good or bad. A super predator doesn’t waste time pouring over a spreadsheet in a lair trying to flesh out the details of his next crime wave like a member of the Prussian General Staff.
Pre-crime activities usually involve loitering or prowling around until opportunities come along. The more a super predator is indoors, the more opportunities he’s missing out on. The miasma that so many young men end up getting mired in has the side effect of keeping them off the streets.
I never see this very simple and obvious phenomenon getting mentioned. If the current de-policing was going on 30 years ago, large swathes of America would’ve been left in smoldering ruins.
I’m proud to officially announce my candidacy for the office of Dogcatcher.
