In yesterday's post on violence and political rhetoric, I presented data showing that America has become a lot less violent in the last few decades. Then this guy -- Nico from Grand Theft Auto -- paid me a visit. He, shall we say, persuaded me to remind you that that's not the whole story. Nico, I'm on it!
The drop in violence may have been a surprise to some readers because your local evening news program just presents one murder after another, without providing historical context. So here are data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports on the US murder rate. What you see is that we have made a lot of progress, relative to the 1980s. But taking a longer view, there was a terrible increase in violence beginning in the early '60s, from which we have only just recovered.
So if we are back to the roughly 5 / 100,000 citizens murder rate of the early 1960s, how concerned should we be? (Obviously, the right murder rate is 0 / 100,000). This is far from the worst murder rate. In 2008, the worst rates were suffered by our Western Hemisphere neighbors Honduras, Jamaica, El Salvador, and Venezuela (60.9, 59.5, 51.8, and 47.2 / 100,000 respectively; UN data). However, these small, troubled countries do not seem to be reasonable comparisons for the US.
We get a less encouraging view if we compare the US to other highly developed countries. Here are the 2008 murder rates for most of the highest gross domestic product per capita countries, ranked left to right in order of decreasing GDP/capita (2009 World Bank data; some nations are not listed because I couldn't find the murder data; "Ost" = Austria, "Aus" = Australia). We have just less than twice the murder rate of the next worst highly developed nation. It doesn't bother Nico, but for the rest of us it is unacceptable.
Interestingly there are states in the USA with low homicide rates.
Posted by: Floccina | 01/14/2011 at 09:34 AM