Also the ones that we outsourced don’t count either. If the corporate media doesn’t report it, Joe Smoe doesn’t know about it, and it didn’t happen.

Welcome to Oceania.

Me: “Of course, doing the same for the US might increase figures a bit.”

Brett:
“Only if you go back to the Civil war, Barry. And WE don’t seem to have one of those every few decades.”

Brett, how many people did the US kill in the 20th century?

The murder rate goes UP in summer, so maybe heat has something to do with it, Jim.

I don’t know why our rate is so high compared with say, Sweden, but I think I can explain the zig-zags: although the rate is high, the actual number of murders is quite small, about 130 per year. So you only need a couple of multiple murders to produce a spike in the chart.

And unfortunately, we do sometimes get such multiple murders. A typical case would be when a drunken husband shoots his family (and then himself).

And fyi, the language is no problem – I could speak it when I was three!

I will try to get a cite to you on this one, I read about this in The Sociology of Crime, a sociology textbook, and that book is packed away in a 10×10 storage locker right now along with about 10,000 other books (uncatalogued, alas) so it may be easier for me to just go check it out at the university library (sigh!). But one thing that was clear from looking at their nice pretty graphs of murder rates vs. cohort size, murder rates, etc. was that a condom has more deterrant value as the death penalty when it comes to murder. Specifically, use of a condom 18 years prior. Further data regarding the cause of murder showed why this was so. A very small percentage of murders (under 5%) were premeditated. Most murders were “heat of the moment” type murders that occurred during an argument, while intoxicated, during a barroom brawl, or otherwise in situations where the murderer acted impulsively and then, only AFTER he’d already killed the person, had that “oh shit” moment: “Oh shit, I could get the death penalty for this!”. Which is a few seconds too late to do any good for the murder rate :-(.

Only if you go back to the Civil war, Barry. And WE don’t seem to have one of those every few decades.

I doubt very much – though who knows, what with all the “But Saddam killed more Iraqis than we did!” rhetoric, the race to the bottom may get there yet – that George Will and Rich Lowry and Peggy Noonan are going to be going “Aren’t we great, just see how much less violence and corruption we have than Columbia and Mexico!” anytime soon.

[/irony]

We just got it out of our system – perhaps – a hundred-fifty years ago. Until eliminationism and witchhunts come back in fashion.

Posted by Brett Bellmore · March 24th, 2005 at 9:12 pm

Of course, doing the same for the US might increase figures a bit.

There’s no use in taking this idea into the pro-life/pro-choice debate, of course: even if there’s something to it, you have to kill a hundred fetuses for every murder averted. So everybody winds up on the same side of that debate as before, at slightly higher stakes.

For another view of homicide (in the US), you might take a look at http://tigger.uic.edu/~mikem//homicide.PDF; the relevant figures (which don’t come out too well in the printed version) can be found at http://www.uic.edu/~mikem/3%20homicide%20figures.pdf

See, for example, http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcgvintl.html.

See, for example, .

There is, of course, a school of thought that excludes self-murder from the “violence” column of public-policy analysis, moving it over to “personal autonomy”. But with all major religions and most of the history of Western moral philosophy weighing in on the other side, it’s surely tendentious to treat this as a closed question, as these graphs implicitly do when headlined as “rates of violent death”.