As we have discussed here before, the mass shootings of strangers that get so much media attention actually represent a tiny fraction of the gun violence in the U.S. But yes, these sorts of events have become more common in the past couple of decades, which contributes to the perception that violent crime is increasing uncontrollably. Republic politicians particularly like to make this claim, although they completely rule out the proposition that any sort of gun safety legislation might be called for.
Let's look at the facts. Because reporting of crime is incomplete, and not uniform by state, the most reliable statistics are for homicide, which is pretty much universally counted. Rates of other violent crimes do tend to track with it. Here is the actual data for the past 30 years, annual homicides per 100,000 population, from Macrotrends.
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As you can see, there was an upturn during the pandemic. I'm sure sociologists will be busy for the next few years trying to explain this, but we can hope it will fade away now. The main takeaway for me is that the trend has generally been downward, and quite substantially, a fact which sociologists so far have not been able to explain. We're still far below the rate in the early '90s.
This isn't anything to be proud of. Although the U.S. is far from the most violent country in the world, our homicide rate is many multiples of the rates in other wealthy countries. In many of them, in fact, it wouldn't even be visible on this chart because the number is less than 1. I'm not drawing any firm conclusions from this, because I don't know everything. But it's important to base the discussion on facts.
4 comments:
Followed the link you provided and saw all of the developed countries that had a lower homicide
rate and what I noticed is none of these countries have a race problem.
There are other important variables that you're not taking into consideration, but this one is the elephant in the room.
The evidence for leaded vs unleaded gasoline is pretty compelling.
What would you expect in a country founded on genocide? Power is what matters here--not life.
As George Carlin says, America is full of shit. Founded by a bunch of slaveowners who claimed that "all men are created equal."
Yes, the lead poisoning theory is disturbingly plausible. However, the epidemic of lead poisoning was not confined to the U.S., if it is part of the story it had a bigger impact here than elsewhere.
Racial oppression does have something to do with the prevalence of violence in the U.S. but it can't account for all of the disparity. But yes, social inequality, more broadly, is at the root of a lot of our unfavorable comparisons to other wealthy countries.
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