Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

Bob Tarantino shoots some holes in Ben Carniol's comments that the underlying cause of violence is budget cuts to social services:

Couple of things to note: one, "budget cut-backs" have not been occurring for "twenty years". Significant cuts to spending (i.e., actual reductions in aggregate dollar amounts, as opposed to marginal reductions in the annual increase of spending) really only materialized starting in 1995 (with the Chretien Liberal downloading of around $40 billion in spending, the Mike Harris cuts and the Ralph Klein cuts). But more importantly, look at the StatsCan charts provided here. Notice something? Violent crime, measured per capita, skyrockted from the early 1960s until the early 1990s - precisely the time during which the Canadian welfare state was being erected and funded with so much money that people started talking about Canada's debt load approaching Third World levels. Which was well before "tax cuts" were enacted. The salient point is that Carniol's description of the world is precisely backwards: crime hasn't increased in the wake of lower levels of social spending - it has decreased. And crime didn't fall during the decades that social spending increased - it nearly quadrupled. Which isn't to say that social spending and crime levels are causally related - rather, if they are related it is in precisely the opposite way which Carniol wants us to believe.