Dr. John Lott talked to Stephen Bannon on WarRoom about Lott’s latest piece at the Federalist titled: “As Deportations Rise, The U.S. Is On Track For The Lowest Murder Rate On Record.”
June 16, 2025
At Real Clear Investigations: Gun Safety: Violent Crime Drops as More Americans Pack Heat
Dr. John Lott has a new piece at Real Clear Investigations. . Alessandra Coote was walking on a trail with her 2-year-old daughter and dog two-and-a-half years ago when a man began yelling at her and threatened to kill her dog. When the petite single mom made it back...
The primary driver of the peak in crime in the 1990s and the subsequent decline is the removal of lead from the atmosphere. There is a ton of medical literature on this. It turns out that crime follows atmospheric lead levels with a 22 year lag. This is a pattern that is consistent over multiple jurisdictions in multiple countries. The reason is that lead damages the part of the brain associated with impulse control, and the damage is done when the victims are children, but the effects show up in crime statistics in late teens and early adulthood. The source of the atmospheric lead was leaded gasoline, which was phased out in the 1970s. Thus, the peak was 20 years later in the 1990s. Since then, crime has been dropping lockstep with the decrease in atmospheric lead. Now it’s about back to baseline and other things will have more of an effect.
In particular, look at Figure 2 in the second reference by Mielke and Zahran.
There is a similar, though less obvious, relation between lead in the soil and crime as well (Guinn, B., 2018. Lead and crime: an ecological study between lead contaminated topsoil and violent crime.) and prenatal exposure (Wright, J.P., Dietrich, K.N., Ris, M.D., Hornung, R.W., Wessel, S.D., Lanphear, B.P., Ho, M. and Rae, M.N., 2008. Association of prenatal and childhood blood lead concentrations with criminal arrests in early adulthood. PLoS medicine, 5(5), p.e101.)
Here’s just a taste of the literature:
Taylor, M.P., Forbes, M.K., Opeskin, B., Parr, N. and Lanphear, B.P., 2016. The relationship between atmospheric lead emissions and aggressive crime: an ecological study. Environmental health, 15, pp.1-10.
Mielke, H.W. and Zahran, S., 2012. The urban rise and fall of air lead (Pb) and the latent surge and retreat of societal violence. Environment international, 43, pp.48-55.
Stretesky, P.B. and Lynch, M.J., 2004. The relationship between lead and crime. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 45(2), pp.214-229.
Taylor, M.P., Forbes, M.K., Opeskin, B., Parr, N. and Lanphear, B.P., 2018. Further analysis of the relationship between atmospheric lead emissions and aggressive crime: an ecological study. Environmental Health, 17, pp.1-4.
Herrnstadt, E., Heyes, A., Muehlegger, E. and Saberian, S., 2016. Air pollution as a cause of violent crime: Evidence from Los Angeles and Chicago. Manuscript in preparation.
Bondy, M., Roth, S. and Sager, L., 2020. Crime is in the air: The contemporaneous relationship between air pollution and crime. Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, 7(3), pp.555-585.