Home / General / Mass shootings, homicide, and suicide in the USA

Mass shootings, homicide, and suicide in the USA

/
/
/
1592 Views

Some general observations:

(1) As I’ve noted before, mass shootings in public spaces that produce large — somewhat arbitrarily defined for these purposes as eight or more — deaths are something that basically didn’t exist in America prior to the 1980s. Since then, the rate at which such mass murders take place has been more or less steadily increasing.

(2) Such mass shootings, and indeed mass shootings in general, even defined much more loosely — by the definition used here we’ve already had more than 200 mass shootings in the US this year — play a minor role in the homicide rate, since the overwhelming majority of homicides involve a single victim, and no sort of intentional public performance on the part of the killer.

(3) The practical importance of mass shootings, specifically mass shootings in the narrower sense of many people killed intentionally in a public place to bring attention to the shooter and his grievances, is that they perform two functions: First, they are acts of terrorism, in that they are designed to create a sense of constant foreboding and anxiety in the society at large: “few victims, many onlookers” in the classic parlance.

Second, they underline what an extraordinarily violent country the USA is, in comparison to its economic peers.

Most recent homicide rates, for a dozen selected countries. Rates are annual per 100,000 population:

Japan: 0.3

Italy: 0.5

Switzerland: 0.5

Spain: 0.6

Netherlands: 0.6

South Korea: 0.6

Norway: 0.6

Austria: 0.7

Ireland: 0.7

Poland: 0.7

Germany: 0.8

Australia: 0.9

The USA’s current homicide rate is approximately TEN TIMES HIGHER than the average in these countries (6.4 in 2020. Preliminary data suggest the rate may have risen slightly in 2021).

This, we should note, is both a significant increase from the middle of the previous decade, when rates had fallen to about 5/100,000 (still of course extraordinarily high in comparison to the developed world), and a much lower rate than that which prevailed from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, when rates reached a high of 10.4 per 100,000 — a rate which would currently make the US one of the 30 most homicidal nations in the world, out of 195. We are currently 60th out of 195, which is just astonishingly terrible for a nation with a fully developed economy.

In sum, the media attention given to mass shootings is obviously bad in some ways, as it creates copycat crimes, and also permits these crimes to achieve their terroristic intent, but it’s obviously good in that it underlines how extraordinarily exceptional America is, in the extent that it tolerates overall levels of homicide that are truly shocking from a comparative perspective.

A related important point is that the majority of gun deaths in the USA are not homicides, but suicides. The 2021 CDC data conclude that approximately 26,000 deaths by suicide took place via firearms, versus about 21,000 homicides.

This is significant because about half of all suicides are essentially impulsive, and the availability of a gun plays an enormous role in the extent to which such impulsive acts result in death.

The bottom line here is a fairly complicated one, in that murder rates in the US are much lower than they were 30 years ago, but a lot higher than they were ten years ago, and still shockingly higher than those found in any comparably wealthy nation. And of course the biggest factor in all this is the 300 million firearms floating around the nation, which wait to be picked up like Justice Robert Jackson’s famous loaded weapon, but in literal rather than metaphorical form.

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Linkedin
This div height required for enabling the sticky sidebar
Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views :