Murder Rate For Generation X Teens
According to a recent blog post, Gen X: Prepare to Get Shafted. Again., by Forrest Christian, Gen Xers are “totally screwed.”
I’ve heard this same thing at least 100 times over the last three years since I began blogging about my generation. While I get a little tired of the constant negative speak, I’ve also never seen so many valid reasons summarized into as quick a read as Christian provides. Moreover, he pointed out something I can’t remember reading in any of the material I’ve covered about Generation X.
He cites a 1999 report of homocide trends in the United States. Although the link he provided to the report mistakenly links back to his site, I found a report from the U.S. Department of Justice that confirms what he wrote: Gen Xers murdered at alarming rates. Check out this graphic from the DOJ’s report.
Christian makes some other alarming statements in his blog post. Check it out and see if you agree with him. Do you think Generation X is disadvantaged more than Boomers or Millennials, etc.?
@JEN HANCOCK – If it’s teens and young adults and it’s for the mid-80s through 1993, the mid-80s definitely cover X. I do think stats can be tricky and you really have to consider a lot of things before deducing to blame.
@FRIAR – This is the third time in a week I’ve heard the abortion-Gen X argument. I’ve had an essay in my drafts for more than a year on this subject. The time has just never seemed right to discuss it. In fact, the time may have passed. I don’t know…
I agree w/ you on that notion that life is not fair and if we think it is then we have good reason to be pessimistic.
Jen — I don’t know if anyone could honestly say how things might have been different if abortion had not been legalized nationwide in 1973. Some situations might be made worse, some might be made better.
CDC figures estimate there were about 10 million legal abortions in the U.S. between 1970, the first year they kept records, and the tail end of Gen X in 1981. Abortion was legal in some states before Roe v. Wade, but the CDC figures don’t go back to our starting point of 1961. Just keeping the 10 million figure though, it seems pretty plain that if any significant percentage of those pregnancies had ended instead in live births, we would see a definitely different society & nation even if we can’t figure for sure what it would have looked like.
PS — those same CDC figures (I’ll e-mail you the link if you don’t have it) show legal abortions don’t start a sustained decline until 1990, which puts a little crimp into one leg of Mr. Christian’s argument.
PPS — Life’s unfairness is not all bad, of course. Thanks to grace, I don’t get what I deserve 😉
Maybe we are, but is there a generation that hasn’t been?
The Greatest and the Silents had to live through the Depression and fight World War II. The Boomers were never allowed to grow up or look at anything in the world beyond their own navels — something that may not have seemed so bad at the time but has seriously hampered their ability to lead those behind them and deal with the real world. Millenials face a world with little to no stability and spend a lot of time listening to their two elder cohorts whine about each other.
We certainly have a number of issues that affect us — the reduction of our number by abortion being an example Christian cites. But we’re screwed only if we somehow absorbed the notion that life is fair, and I think human existence provides substantial evidence of the flaws in that hypothesis.