Sure, but lead has multiple known mechanisms which would indeed cause individuals to be more likely to commit crime, and serious efforts to get lead out of fuel

Sure, but lead has multiple known mechanisms which would indeed cause individuals to be more likely to commit crime, and serious efforts to get lead out of fuel correlated pretty strongly with a maxima in crime rates that had been steadily increasing for decades. [0] While it is clear to me that there were other legislative and possibly environmental changes that also contributed to this drop, I think that applying 'correlation is not causation' here while applying no scrutiny to the argument that "removing lead from fuel didn't do shit" is pretty facile. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis