Murder most foul

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.  . 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...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs