It was a rough start to the year 2025. One of our citizens decided to murder as many revelers in New Orleans as possible and drove a truck into pedestrians, killing at least 14 and injuring dozens more. On the same day in Las Vegas, another of our citizens decided to blow up a Tesla truck in front of a Trump hotel. His precise intentions are unknown, but it did result in his own death and injuries to several people near the blast. Our President-elect indicated that this was part of an unprecedented crime wave sweeping through America fueled by the onslaught of undocumented immigrants. In fact, his statements were in no way true.
The man committing the slaughter in New Orleans was an American citizen, born in Texas, educated in the United States, having served in the United States army, and working in real estate in America. The man operating the Tesla that exploded in Las Vegas was similarly an American citizen, born in the USA, and serving in the United States army. Both of these men had served in Afghanistan.
The notion that crime in America has been increasing over the past four years is simply wrong. In fact, the level of violent crime has been steadily decreasing over the past four years. Anyone in politics who is aware of this will of course take credit for the current trend, but it is unlikely that any recent laws or other political initiatives have had much impact on the rate of violent crimes in our country.
Several current theories for the steady decline include an ongoing reduction of lead in the environment, changes in the inflation rate, increase in the general wage rate, and the aging of the American population. There are of course those who will say that efforts to restrict the exposure of children to violence and the improvement in child services are having a long-awaited impact, but I suspect that the exposure to violence and the variety of media providing that exposure has increased as the variety of medias has increased. There may have been an improvement in child services in some cities or sections of the country, but there is no substantial evidence that in the past four years there has been a dramatic improvement in access to assistance for children who live in poverty. In fact, the rate of homelessness in the United States has increased every year over the past four years and that certainly increases the hardship faced by both the parents and the children who do not have adequate housing.
The other aspect of violence in America continues to be gun related murders, suicides, and injuries. America continues to value its guns more than it values the lives of its citizens. Much of the alleged justification for the easy access to firearms is the need for self-protection. Given the high rate of suicide and accidental injuries by firearms, it is evident that these lethal devices are not protecting our fellow citizens.
The other common misconception promoted by many of our politicians is that undocumented immigrants are the principal source of violent and nonviolent crimes in America. Actually, the per capita rate of violent and nonviolent crimes committed by undocumented immigrants is lower than that for citizens born in the United States and for immigrants who have legal status to be in the United States. This should be self-evident to those who claim that the poor streaming across the southern border are a source of crime rather than of labor, since undocumented immigrants obviously want to avoid the attention of law enforcement. The journey to the United States is dangerous, expensive, and time consuming for most of these people fleeing oppression and other intolerable conditions in their home countries. That they would risk apprehension by law enforcement by flaunting the legal system is unlikely.
Obviously, America does not have to import lunatics. It has plenty of its own. The two who apparently sought to bring misery to this country over the New Year’s weekend are fairly typical of the folks who simply want to undermine the country that they were born in and live in. We shall not know what motivated these two individuals. Some will insist that there was a religious motivation or a political statement inherent in what these two men did, but close examination of their actions suggests only that they were quite mad in every sense of the word. No border walls or other types of interdiction will protect us from the deranged.
Dr. Lechtenberg is an Easton resident who graduated from Tufts University and Tufts Medical School in Massachusetts and subsequently trained at The Mount Sinai Hospital and Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan. He worked as a neurologist at several New York Hospitals, including Kings County and The Long Island College Hospital, while maintaining a private practice, teaching at SUNY Downstate Medical School, and publishing 15 books on a variety of medical topics. He worked in drug development in the U.S., as well as in England, Germany, and France.
