With all the negative stuff we get regarding violence in the US, our homicide rates are continuing to drop (4.7/100,000 in 2012) and are really not far off rates in Western Europe at this point (which are around 1/100,000).http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder- ... -and-state
By the way, I stopped even lukewarm support of the death penalty when I reflected on how countries with no death penalty also had low homicide rates. Here too it can be seen that death penalty states have higher homicide rates than non-death penalty states.

the major reason murder rates are dropping is demographic.
young people (18-34) are most likley to be invovled in violence and the older a person gets the less likely they are to commit violence.
As baby boomers aged and as echo babies aged, they moved a very large, and a slightly larger spike of population through the demographic profile...
Since older people are a larger percentage of the total population than they have ever been, and since they murder less.... a drop in the murder rate was seemingly inevitable.
Read Boom, Bust Echo by David Foot for more revelations about how demographics can predict most things. (Funeral business is a growth business right now, for instance)

freeman3

are really not far off rates in Western Europe at this point

They are four and a half times as high ....
isn't that a long way off?

It certainly is in the right direction, but I'm not sure that it is 'not that far off' rates of about 1 in 100,000. If our murder rate trebled (and so was still lower than that of the USA), it would be pretty shocking. And consider that according to the stats on Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co ... icide_rate , Northern Africa has a lower average rate than the USA. Comparing to Eastern Europe, the USA is comparable to some of the ex-Soviet states like Latvia, Ukraine and Estonia.

Ok, maybe that was a bit of spin that US homicide rates are not that far off from Western Europe...but a 50 percent reduction in 20 years is pretty good.

freeman3 wrote:Ok, maybe that was a bit of spin that US homicide rates are not that far off from Western Europe...but a 50 percent reduction in 20 years is pretty good.

Indeed it is. Ours are heading in the right direction also. The number of murders in the latest recorded year is about half that of 2003. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... urope.html

the major reason murder rates are dropping is demographic.
young people (18-34) are most likley to be invovled in violence and the older a person gets the less likely they are to commit violence.
As baby boomers aged and as echo babies aged, they moved a very large, and a slightly larger spike of population through the demographic profile...
Since older people are a larger percentage of the total population than they have ever been, and since they murder less.... a drop in the murder rate was seemingly inevitable.
Read Boom, Bust Echo by David Foot for more revelations about how demographics can predict most things. (Funeral business is a growth business right now, for instance)

That's one theory, but it can't account for the dramatic rate of decrease in crime rates since the mid 90s. There are all kinds of other theories that have been advanced. One interesting one I read was that the sharp drop in crime rates seen in all western countries correlates closely with the time when they banned leaded petrol. Lead poisoning is well known to cause erratic and more aggressive behaviour, and once lead emissions were cut from the atmosphere in our cities the next generation seemed to get less violent. It's an interestring idea at least.

I saw a fight in town a few weeks ago but it must have been the first time I'd seen a fight in years. It was never like that when I was growing up, there were loads more fights.

sass

I saw a fight in town a few weeks ago but it must have been the first time I'd seen a fight in years

Could it be you don't get out as much any more? Or the crowd you hang around with is a lot older and less prone to settling things with fisticuffs?

http://www.csc-scc.gc.ca/research/forum ... -eng.shtml

Here's (link) some statistical analysis that proves the demographic argument...