Murder in America: A historian's perspective

As of 1933, the U.S. murder rate stood at 9.3 per 100,000 annually; in 1993 it was 9.5. But the figures dropped sharply in between, to 4.5 in the 1950 s, at the height of the urban industrial revolution. Despite the lack of re liable national figures before the 1930s, it is clear that a peak was reach ed shortly before the Civil War, and then dropped for generations. Rural ar eas, especially in the South and West, were more deadly than urban areas un til the 1960s. The downturn after 1993 will likely be short-lived, dependin g on a number of conditions and policies that will either end soon or are r eaching their effective limits. In any case, the public is less frightened by the numbers than by the nature of homicides, and several scary kinds, in cluding mass, ideological, and felony murder, have been on the increase. Ab solute poverty and the:judicial system have been less important than have i ndustrial or postindustrial growth, "relative deprivation," family stabilit y, the drug trade, and, in recent decades, color television. High American rates, finally, owe much but not all to our gun culture; our violence is ro oted not in the frontier but in the brutality of Southern slavery and its " culture of honor."