How bad is it? In the wake of the V-Tech mass murder the Europeans are tut-tutting about a US history of violence.
The official story since 1900 is not pretty: two huge murder waves, one peaking in 1933 and one peaking in 1991. See Bureau of Justice Statistics Homicide Trends chart. Interestingly, according to Eric Monkkonen in Murder in New York, murder has not been a unique New York City phenomenon. Murder in New York was under the national average right through the first half of the 20th century. Until the murder wave that began in 1965.
You can see country-by-counntry murder rates on this page from Wikipedia. At the beginning of the 20th century the murder rate in the United States was about the same as the United Kingdom: about one per 100,000 inhabitants. In about 1905 the murder rate took off in the US, peaking in the 1930s and the 1980s at 10 per 100,000.
Now it’s down to 5 or 6 per 100,000.
Where will it go next?
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