I surely fall outside of where they gathered their statistics, but living in a rural area, and going to small schools (circa 1995), my car alarm was quite usefu

I surely fall outside of where they gathered their statistics, but living in a rural area, and going to small schools (circa 1995), my car alarm was quite useful. It's different when you live in a place where people know one another, and give a damn about crime. 99% of the time, myself, or someone I knew, was within earshot of my alarm. First off, everyone here knows that default settings often don't suffice. You can't just take the alarm out of the box, hook it up, and call it good. You have to configure it, and sometimes that takes a bit of effort to get right. My alarm would only go off if someone broke a window, crashed into my car (hard), or tried the door handles. I wanted it to activate in each of those scenarios. Next, the blinking LED. I knew guys that would simply wire in an LED, no alarm at all, because the flashing LED is what said "I have an alarm and it's armed." Nobody here avoided pranking their friend (or nemesis) because they saw that red LED? I certainly did, it says DO NOT TOUCH. Not the case these days, but twenty years back, blinky lights were fancy. Finally, there are all kinds of alarms, they don't all have blaring sirens. Even in the 90s, there was an alarm that signaled a pager (don't recall the protocol). There was also the option of just flashing the lights, or outright killing power to everything. From sensors to alerts, nothing has improved over the last twenty years? Bah! Again, being from a rural area, I'm likely an exception to the rule; I can imagine car alarms causing insanity in the city. But, I've got to say that my car alarm was pretty useful back in high school and college. And, knowing that other people had alarms stopped quite a few shenanigans within my group of friends. I hesitate to say this, but reckless as it may be, some of us do want to go kick some criminal ass when the opportunity presents itself. I tackled a guy and had him tied to a chair when the cops arrived, it was awesome! I'm not going to argue the math, this article is surely on the right side of things, I'm just offering a different perspective. My car no longer has an alarm, but it also doesn't have five grand in speakers, CDs, and other teenage crap in it. My house now has the alarm, but it consists of all kinds of cool stuff other than a siren; there's no reason it can't be the same with modern car alarms.