Via Stefan Schubert, here's an interesting chart:
The sudden increase in the 1860s is likely due to the invention of reliable guns, which made assassinations a lot easier. But what's up with the big increase starting in the '50s and then dropping away in the early 2000s? Why were there a record number of assassinations in the '70s?
Those of you who have put up with me for a long time will recognize this particular shape immediately: it's nearly the same as the violent crime trend caused by automobile lead. That trend was worldwide, which explains why it might also underlie an international assassination trend.
This isn't a perfect fit, since it peaks in the '70s, but even more than crime there are probably lots of other conditional factors that affect assassination trends. So we shouldn't be surprised with a loose fit instead of a tight one.
Alternatively, lead might not have anything to do with assassinations. But I'll bet it does. The world has, in general, just gotten less dangerous over the past few decades since the end of the lead era. It will get less dangerous still as the late lead phaseouts in the Middle East take full effect by the end of this decade. Unleaded gasoline may be the most important invention of the entire postwar era.
Frank Church had a whole select committee devoted to investigating that spike.
I am sure there are multiple variable involved. One component, as I have a brother who formerly served in US Special Forces, is training. Personal protection details now get top notch training from skilled sources, such as US Special Forces.
"CIA" springs to mind.
Just one day too soon!
"Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico is in a life-threatening condition in a hospital Wednesday after being shot multiple times in an assassination attempt."
In April, a man in Poland with connections to Russian intelligence was arrested and charged with providing information for a possible plot to assassinate Volodymyr Zelensky.
Earlier in May, two Ukrainian colonels were arrested for plotting to assassinate Zelensky.
Fico is a pro-Russian, anti-Western p.m. of Slovakia who halted arms deliveries to Ukraine.
It's a story worth following.
AP:
He's not dead so he doesn't count.
It was the era of Latin American coups, right? There was one like every week.
Dones't look like it. This is the data source that was used. I'm not seeing any in LA between Trujillo in 1961 and Moise in 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinated_and_executed_heads_of_state_and_government
The Cold War is the obvious provoking factor, though lead certainly helps.
Yes, I expect the take off in the 50s, peak in the 70s and collapse in the 90s/aughts has to do with success of communist movements in the third world.
Was the plot corrected for inflation?
Starting in the 1950s decolonization produced a rapid increase in the number of states, and therefore the number of heads of state, and therefore the number of potential assassination targets.
There it is, skeptonomist! Needs correction for the ‘inflation’ in the number of heads of state!
To which I would, lots of people figthing for control of states in the early years of formation.
Also, what you'd really want to know is assassination attempts. The number of successful assassinations is far too low to draw any meaninful conclusions.
I was going to say it was all about the Cold War, but, duh, you are correct. A lot of new countries with unstable governments. And the Cold War didn't help.
About the U.S. and assassination. Conservatives control the Supreme Court so now there’s not need to kill progressive leaders.
A bit cynical but it certainly seemed that way to some of us who lived through it. Yeah I realize Wallace and Reagan weren’t progressive…. but they were failed attempts.
Right-wingers, sadly, have better aim.
If you're talking about the US, what rightwing assassins, with good aim, have we had? I have trouble thinking of any later than John Wilkes Booth.
There hasn't been a serious attempted assassination of an American president since John Hinckley's shooting of Reagan in 1981.
Presidents are term-limited while SCOTUS justices serve for life, so one could achieve more by targeting the latter. But I haven't heard of anyone doing that except for that guy arrested after the Dobbs leak.
My guess is that heads of state have better security now, and some of those security measures are things like cameras, which allow for more monitoring of crowds. That could explain a lot of the drop in recent decades. The JFK assassination just doesn't seem like it could happen now - there's no way someone with a long gun could hide along the parade route today. Trauma surgery is also much better now, if you do get shot.
As for the rise in the late 20th century - there were a lot of post-colonial states with really awful leaders and frequent coups.
"...heads of state have better security now..."
Not in Slovakia, apparently. Fico took five shots at point blank range across a barrier that would hardly stop a child. The lax security in the video at the link is rather shocking.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/05/15/world/slovakia-prime-minister-fico-shooting/94bc177c-9ed2-5a3b-a0a3-ec9833318d02?smid=url-share
(You have to scroll down to the Lauren Leatherby post at 1:05 pm for the video of the shooting.)
Getting a long gun into the textbook depository would still be easy today. In fact easier, since the 2nd amendment nuts have made carrying long guns in public a lot more common.
Compared to 1963? I don't believe that. Scalia used to ride the subway with a rifle when he was young, the 60s assassinations themselves helped inspire restrictions on guns (which the NRA initially supported, then had a members revolt over, elevating a celebrity with a history of participating in protests).
If I had to guess:
Factors causing the increase:
-Easy access to good quality weapons and explosives (easier to carry out assassinations)
-Easy access to reliable communications (easier to carry out plans)
-Lax security measures (think how easy it was to commit crimes like fraud, plane hijackings, etc.)
-Cold War (the world was essentially split in two camps that hated each other).
-Intelligence services becoming a key player in world politics
-Wide acceptance of violence as a means to take power
Factors causing the decrease afterwards
-Professionalization of security details
-Introduction of electronic records into most aspects of life (now people could more easily do background checks or identify threats)
-Overall tightening of security (wide spread use of security cameras, metal detectors, passports with better security measures, etc).
-Winding down and end of Cold War
-Widespread rejection of violence by populations to gain political power
I thought the problem with lead was it screwed up impulse control. I doubt very many assasinations are done impulsively.
Yeah, I think this hypothesized connection is way off the mark. Also the effects of lead is something you may see in trends across large populations, but in data with just a handfull of datapoints per year it is not even suggestive,.
Looking at this chart, it really looks like this:
1860s - 1990s: baseline of 5-10 per year, likely due to introduction of high quality weapons/ammunition
1950s - 1990s: add ~5-10 due to an exuberant espionage community during Cold War.
2000s present: definitely a major reduction. Not sure why. Cold War mostly over. Enhanced security & surveillance??
The lowest decade of the 20th century was the 1940s, a time well-known for global peace and good feelings.
In the first half of the 40s everyone the world was already at war so it was hard to get close enough to world leaders with everyone on edge due to the war. Despite this, as mentioned by you, Hitler was a frequent target of attempts. Once the war was over, that's when countries moved from all out war to spywork and assassinations by proxies to get rid of leaders they disapproved of.
Well in the 1940s everyone who wanted to go out and shoot other people had a very easy path to follow to do so quite legally.
The drop in assassinations is reason to celebrate. Usually.
But sometimes it's the failed attempts that make you wonder what might have been. Wikipedia lists 23 attempts on the life of Hitler. Verdammt! Dummköpfe! Couldn't just one of them succeed?
With Hitler there is a question of timing. If he had been assassinated any time before the invasion of Poland, the world probably would have benefited. After that, Germany was in a war and Hitler's ineptitude as commander in chief was such that killing him would most likely have resulted in an improvement in Germany's fighting abilities. In about 1943, it is reported that Churchill and Roosevelt contemplated targeting Hitler with bombing raids but decided against it because his replacement at that time would certainly have increased Germany's military efficiency.
"That trend was worldwide"
No it wasn't:
https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2015/10/01/assault-death-rates-1960-2013/
One way for a loner to hit a country hard is to assassinate a head of state. Another way is suicide bombing. I'd like to see the latter added to the graph above to see if there has been a change in method - especially over the last 30 years.
another way to fuck up a country is for a lying narcissistic sociopath to become president and convince 47% of the public that he's the corporeal manifestation of the living christ on earth
The attempt in Slovakia is a blow for freedom, whatever the actual motive. Hope he has a miserable and short life left. Russian whore.
I expect trump to attack Biden in the debate. Hope he’s not armed.
Yes, it is good to highlight the pervasive effects of lead exposure on impulsive behaviors. Lead has contributed to a range of tragedies in the past - many of these tragedies are quite rare now.
For example, a lead effect seems plausible in reducing streaking and crowd crushes. I had not been aware of how frequent these crowd crushes have been previously in even Western nations. One of the few examples in the last quarter century of a crowd crush in the West was at Astroworld in Texas in 2021. One would think that fairly simple technologies could be used to prevent them (perhaps using pedestrian traffic signaling etc.). However, at these events when alcohol is combined with lead neurotoxicity, very dangerous conditions in large crowds of concert goers etc. could easily be predicted.
This is a little bit of shoehorning... Not *everything* is about lead.
What was happening geopolitically in the 1910s-1970s had a helluva lot more to do with the assassinations than the hypothesis that lead was involved. Lead exposure might have nudged the numbers upwards a bit, but the globalization of warfare and the birthing of the modern world from the wreckage of the Napoleonic/Bismarckian era of Europe had a lot more to do with it. And then the Cold War and the CIA...
And the decline is far more about the rise of the surveillance state and surveillance/security technology than a decline in lead exposure. It's a lot harder to plan and execute a violent criminal plot these days, especially against VIPs, than it was even 30 years ago.
cmayo, I subscribe to the radical Leadist perspective that everything is about lead.
All the important social events from 1850-2050 should only be interpreted with reference to the near universal lead contamination that was present in industrial nations through this historical era.
One might then consider why for example the War of 1812 had number of fatalities many of orders of magnitude lower than that of the Civil War. The record of lead contact suggests that by 1850s lead had become part of mass industrial production.
The geopolitical role that Germany played in the first part of the 20th Century then begins to seem explicable due to Germany's industrial leadership.
One might also consider how Roe v. Wade might have been influenced by near peak atmospheric lead levels and in turn how its recent overturn might also relate to near multicentury low lead levels in today's youth along with correspondingly low teenage pregnancy rates.
Dumping hundreds of thousands of tons of lead annually into the ambient American air supply was clearly not a good idea. The effects that this neurotoxin has had (and continues to have) on human well-being is without question profound.
Yet, the lead story is still not really over as current median lead levels in youth are still 50 fold higher than those present in pre-industrial society. We have no idea what baseline human behavior is like without all of the neuropathology. The contamination is so widespread that 2 year olds continue to consume a microgram of lead every day in their baby formula. Will we ever return to our lost Eden of a nearly lead free world? Fortunately, there are no other neurotoxic pollutants that are so widely dispersed in our environment as lead was.
based on the lead hypothesis, one would expect truancy rates to start falling in the 1990's, but the data from milwaukee doesn't support the theory
https://urbanmilwaukee.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/TruancyC-450x289.png
Milwaukee is an old school industrial city. It wouldn't surprise me at all to find houses coated in lead paint, and playground dust contaminated with atmospheric lead. You kind of need to know a little more than just the raw truancy rate to properly interpret the data.
It's also pretty close to Canada, which did not ban lead until December 1990. It would be interesting to see data from other Canada adjacent cities to see if that was a factor.
truancy rate national chart 1995-2010
https://images.newrepublic.com/1994ddf78499d61493a3ae399f9fc042d869ee4d.png?w=500&h=462
from article
https://newrepublic.com/article/121186/truancy-laws-unfairly-attack-poor-children-and-parents
lower-case, many time series of social variables over the last few decades have shown the lead effect. However, not all time series will be good candidates. The truancy data does not appear to be a particularly good candidate as seen in the figure you provided.
Why might that be? The lead effect is much more prominent when you have strong selection. With youth homicide rates we see enormous changes that occurred coincident with their childhood blood levels. Notably, youth homicide rates are typically measured on a scale of perhaps 1 in 10,000. Such strong selection amongst highly disadvantaged children will greatly amplify the lead effect. In the most disadvantaged youth with the highest childhood lead levels the decline in crime rates with lower lead was astronomical.
The truancy stats you provided are for population scale non-selected students. Without selection for the most lead exposed it becomes difficult to see effects even if they were present. With truancy it is not even that clear what the "correct" response should be. (It would be helpful to have a wider historical range in this time series to see longer term trends).
The logic with truancy might be complex. For example, in dangerous neighborhoods, school might be one of the only safe places in the students' lives. High lead levels might then encourage school attendance: Scared Straight.
The recent rise in truancy in Wisconsin might be related to the now low lead environment as academic demands might have increased and those students who can no longer keep up are feeling increasingly marginalized. For such students there would be a rational basis for fleeing school environments that were not suited to them.
Truancy then might have a more complicated interpretation than other social variables.
There are apparently yet more behaviors induced by lead neurotoxicity that have escaped my notice. I have only now become somewhat more familiar with an emergent behavior of the 1970s called slamdancing/moshing etc.. Basically, in certain forms of music in the general categories of trash/metallic hardcore/grunge etc. those in the mosh pit would become involved in substantial levels of violence. In one manifestation concertgoers would "crowdsurf" and in the process kick many of those beneath them in the head. In a particularly nasty form of moshing, large men would go outside of the mosh pit and choose a female and then just punch her in the face. Such a male might have more than a 100 pound weight advantage over the female. Who are these people? I do not know any such people. I do not know any people who know such people.
The obvious innovation that could be introduced is that there could be a well marked area of the concert for the mosh pit. Perhaps there could be a wide red line on the ground marking the boundary between the mosh pit and general attendance. Any assaultive behavior that was on the red line or distal to the pit would constitute criminal assault.
This is the exact type of behavior that I referred to above as being exemplary of lead neurotox. It is extremely highly selective and demonstrates extreme impulsiveness. We are not even talking about merely the people who go to trash or metal hardcore concerts where moshing is expected behavior. We can consider this subset of moshers who are largely in the pit who expect and enjoy the violence of the concerts. The selection involved is almost unimaginable. Perhaps 1 in a 1,000 of the youth population? 1 in a 50,000 at population scale?
Would be tremendously interesting to do brain neuroimaging for these veteran moshers. Do they have a prefrontal cortex?
I have been reading subreddits about this subculture and apparently there is great nostalgia for the enthusiasts for 20 years ago (the twilight of the lead era) when crowdsurfing, crowd killing, slam dancing etc. was in its heyday. Now they feel its getting lame. What is the world coming to when unprovoked criminal assaults at concert are no longer acceptable. That's what happens when you remove lead.
The irony of this when Fico was nearly assassinated today.
Medical care probably got better. Scalise should have died too. Abe did die.
Adding lead was an invention. A bad one, but still an invention. It was a novel solution to a problem, though adding more severe problems as a consequence.
I'm not sure you can count leaving something out as an invention. Gas doesn't come out of the refinery with lead. Or maybe you could say that unleaded gas was the original invention since before the war that was just gas.
1950 - I vote for TV as the culprit. Suddenly an assassination would be broadcast across the nation in minutes, gaining fame for the perpetrator.
1970 - security forces finally started perfecting preventing would be assassins from having any access to would be targets.
Carrying out an assassination usually is premeditated. Takes lots of planning and patience as you wait for the target to get to the right place at the right time. Gotta research where the target will be, gotta practice how you’ll gain access, etc. That doesn’t sound like lead poisoning which made its victims more impulsive and violent in their criming, but not necessarily more able to methodically plan a detailed crime.
Could it be the culmination of the Cold War?
So Millennials killed the assassination.
Thanks a bunch, folks.
I do think the fad of mass shootings may have absorbed people who would have otherwise attempted an assassination. There are also fewer serial killers compared to decades ago.
Heads of state or heads of government?
British Prime Minister Spencer Perceval was assassinated in 1812, one of the first modern assassinations. Yet he was head of government, not head of state.
What's the distinction about "modern" assassination? In the Reformation era two French kings in a row (Henry III and Henry IV) were assassinated. A few years later the Duke of Buckingham, who was running the English government, was assassinated. Apart from the weapons of choice in those (knives not guns) what was unmodern about those murders?
Era. Specifically, the era covered by the chronological chart shown here.
Blimey, it's totally weird to get stuck on the word "modern". People use "modern" to mean all sorts of things. In the computer field, something isn't modern if it's more than 2 or 3 years old.