Gilligan tracked rates of suicide and homicide over a century, from 1900 to 2007 and was intrigued by the peaks and valleys he saw. Over that period, he writes, “I saw three large, sudden, and prolonged increases and decreases in these measures of lethal violence, which reached a peak and were then followed by equally dramatic decreases.”
He scratched his head over that until he realized that “all three of the epidemics of lethal violence corresponded with the presidential election cycle.”
Now, the next part of this item will get Republicans’ noses out of joint and will no doubt start Democrats thumping their chests. What Gilligan found was that suicides and homicides started climbing to epidemic levels following the election of a Republican president. If that isn’t annoying enough to the Grand Old Party, he also discovered that the rates remained around epidemic levels throughout the time Republicans occupied the White House. “The increase began during their first year or years in office, and peaked in their last year or years,” Gilligan writes.
And what happened when a Democratic president toodled up to the White House gate in a moving van? Those epidemic levels of violence, according to Gilligan, began to reverse direction in the first year or two of a Democratic administration and the rates reached their lowest point in the last year or years of the Democratic term.
... The cause: policies. In Gilligan’s view, the policies of Republican administrations increase socio-economic distress which has all sorts of ramifications that lead to higher rates of murder and suicide, while Democratic administrations reduce socio-economic distress which aids the psychology of the masses and brings down the levels of violence.
Indeed it does. Indeed.
TFG
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