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Comment by dfxm12 | Hacker News Reader

rising crime rates.

What can you do about a low information voter?

they're not planning on needing an abortion ever, let alone any time soon.

People rarely plan to get an abortion. Setting that aside, more than anything, from a political perspective, this is an issue about freedom. I'm not planning on buying a firearm any time soon, but I wouldn't support a firearm ban (and thankfully, I don't have to worry about this because no mainstream politician is running on this policy). It doesn't matter what your thoughts about abortion are, women should have the freedom to have autonomy over themselves. Also, the anti-abortion laws are also preventing women from getting medicine for treating some chronic disease.

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> What can you do about a low information voter?

I already explained this in another reply, but while crime rates might be going down across the board, I'm talking about what my daughters, my wife and their friends are telling me. And they are not low information voters, because crime rates are sky rocketing in our area and the data supports that. We live in what used to be considered one of the safest cities in all of Canada, and now we hear about a new shooting or stabbing in public just about every week. Mostly drug and gang related.

Everything else you said, especially about the abortion issue being a freedom issue, is preaching to the choir. I agree with you. I'm talking about the mindset of my wife, my daughters and their friends and what they say matters to them.

> What can you do about a low information voter?

You can cite various statistics to a person up until the point their car or house is broken into. Or, until they don't feel safe at night any longer in the neighborhood they grew up.

We can double down and say these are "ignorant" voters, maybe even insult them, but I doubt that will help win them over. Even worse, it will alienate them.

At what point do you think you should look a little more locally for the problem when nationwide trends are going the other way?

Why do you think crime is down?

Looking at 12 month running averages from FBI UCR since 2012, crime has been in a generally increasing trend from the last minimum, which was in the 12 months starting Jan 2020, to a maximum in the year starting Dec 2022.

https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crim...

Going by the recent FBI report: https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2023-cr...

>this is an issue about freedom.

There is a fundamental issue that pro-choice people (of which I am, as well) continuously overlook with this argument: a fetus isn't merely a clump of cells up until it leaves the woman's body. At some point it's a viable human being and also deserves rights. Is that 3 months? 6 months? 8 months? I don't know, but it's somewhere.

Most people in the world share that view; why are pro-abortionists so ignorant of it?

Who exactly do you think gets abortions? When and why? Because this is another obvious lie we hear from the Trump's campaigning: “They will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month and even after birth.”

93.5% of abortions happen before 13 weeks. 0.9% happen after 21 weeks [0]. Since Texas' trigger laws have been put into place, the maternal mortality rate rose by 56% [1]! In 2022, there was an 11.6% increase in infant mortality! Before that, across the years 2014-2021, infants death fell nearly 15% [2]. On top of this, 4 pregnant women have died because they couldn't get the care they needed and and again, women are finding they can't get certain medicines for chronic diseases because doctors are afraid to prescribe them. If you respect these lives, I would invite you to consider what is happening in the real world alongside your thought exercises about cells.

0 - https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/ss/ss7209a1.htm#:~:text=....

1 - https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/texas-abortion-...

2 - https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/20/health/texas-abortion-ban-inf...

> What can you do about a low information voter?

Crime has increased in the US. The official numbers were wrong and were recently corrected, instead of dropping by 2% they actually increased by over 4%.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41859346

This is something that the average person saw. The only people who didn't were in a bubble.

The article you're linking to makes claims about FBI data, but its only evidence are links to and images created from another website [0], and not the FBI data it is referencing. Further, following the link, the site claims "the data is here" and links only to self hosted excel files and not to the referenced FBI data.

0 - A website which happens to have a conservative bias and has failed several fact checks according to Media Bias/Fact Check: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/crime-prevention-research-cen...

And even if they were low by U.S. standard, they're still much higher than other countries, and much higher than people would like. Imagine if someone responded like that to other issues:

"I think we should do more to reduce childhood hunger."

"Childhood hunger is already lower than it used to be, you must be a low information voter."

"I think we should do more to reduce traffic fatalities."

"Traffic fatalities are already lower than they used to be, you must be a low information voter."

"I think we should reduce carbon emissions."

"Carbon emissions are already lower than they used to be, you must be a low information voter."

If these are important issues for you, you're not going to want to be on the same team with the people who respond like that.

The original discuss was around "rising crime rates", not "high crime rates". Even if you want to have this separate discussion, you're leaving out the obvious context of "crime rates are lower than they used to be when Trump was president immediately prior to this", so, if you think crime is too high, the answer is not someone who presided over even more crime.

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