Personal Violence
03 Oct 1994 12:02As opposed to organized violence, like war. I'm not sure whether family feuds or gang warfare fits.
Frequency over historical time. In the US. In other industrial countries. In non-industrial contries. History of impulsive violence. Gun trade.
In Landscapes of Fear, Yi-Fu Tuan quotes the following estimates for the homicide rates (number of persons killed per year per 100,000 people) in several jursidiction of medieval England, averaged over a few decades: Bedford, Kent: 28; Warwick: 19; Norfolk: 9; Bristol: 4; London: 8--15. Since the 1930s, Britain has averaged 0.4 --- but the United States, since 1974, a far more traditional 9.7. That is to say, by this very basic measure we are not a civilized country. (Some more recent but not strictly comprable numbers come from the Economist, 22 Oct. 1994, supplement, p. 4: homicides "of males, by males" per year per 100,000: USA 12.4, EU 1.6, Japan 0.9. No margin of error is supplied, so I can't say whether the difference between the EU and Japan signfies.) Query: what has made the Europeans so much more peaceful than their ancestors? And why are Americans so much more violent than other industrial peoples? (We are also much more religious and we have many more guns. Would the NRA sponsor an inquiry into the effects of wide-spread belief in immortality on homicide rates, I wonder?)
- See:
- Erik Larson, Lethal Passage
- Jill Levoy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America
- Nisbett and Cohen, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South
- Andrew V. Papachristos, "Murder by Structure: Dominance Relations and the Social Structure of Gang Homicide", American Journal of Socioloy 115 (2009): 74--128 [Though I have methodological quibbles about the way the paper tries to quantify/support social contagion of murder]
- Yi-Fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear [The statistics I quoted are from p. 132]
- To read:
- Geofrrey Canada, Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence in America
- Roger V. Gould, Collision of Wills: How Ambiguity about Social Rank Breeds Conflict
- Johnson and Monkkonen (eds.), The Civilization of Crime: Violence in Town and Country since the Middle Ages
- Kenneth Polk, When Men Kill: Scenarios of Masculine Violence
- Terance D. Miethe and Wendy C. Regoeczi, Rethinking Homicide: Exploring the Structure and Process Underlying Deadly Situations
- Magic M. Wade, "``Not as Bad as the '90s''? Firearm Violence in Small, Mid-Size, and Large US Cities, 2015--2021", Homicide Studies forthcoming (2023)
