Hey, Cypher here.
We’ve all heard about violence in the United States.
In the news it’s fairly easy to focus on, but I’ve got a historical question.
Is violence in America worse?
The easy answer is a clear and indefatigable NO.
Violence in America, by most conventional measures, has sharply decreased in recent
years.
That begs the question though.
How do we make such measurements, and when was it the worst.
Mostly, we measure violence in America by murder rate.
The rate has clearly been decreasing since the 1990s.
Our country has more people living in it currently, then the number of Americans who have died
throughout our entire two and half century lifespan, of natural causes or otherwise.
Yet our total number of murders for the last couple years is that of the late 1960s.
Per capita we are definitely less likely to see violence.
Murder rate is problematic though, since violence does not only mean murder.
There’s other violent crimes like physical assault, armed theft, and rape.
Interestingly enough, these numbers are also lower than in the 90s.
There is a very clear turn in the early 1990’s that shows decreasing crime rates across the
board.
Of course we don’t really have numbers for this prior to WWII, but one can be certain
that the amazing decline in crime now is unmatched in American history.
Every state in the union has its version of a famous early killer, from California’s
Joaquin Murrieta, my favorite Nevada’s Queho, all the way to the worst serial killer in
history HH Holmes in Chicago.
It is impossible to tally, but 19th century murder was undoubtedly more common.
There have been a number of explanations of this, from the FBI claiming better law enforcement
standards, to the book Freakonomics claiming that it was legalizing abortion (which is
a very interesting argument and should not be dismissed out of hand).
Of course there has been a different sort of violence in the news recently, which deserves
attention, and might counteract the FBI’s claim.
Police brutality, especially in regards to racial prejudice, has become a very important
subject after Ferguson Missouri.
This is infamously hard to get actual numbers on though.
The only sure thing on this is that we can see individual cases that get lots of news
attention.
Of course, there are a number of things that show police brutality might not be as bad
as the news makes it out to be.
We cannot definitively say that there are less cases at any given time in history, but
we can point to historical examples that are surely worse.
For instance, lynchings in the south from WWI to the 50s were very common, and often
supported by local law enforcement.
Labor strikes for awhile often ended in violence, and some of the killing was caused by law
enforcement and local militia.
Look at the great strike of 1874, the May Day strike of 1886, the coal miner wars, the
1894 Pullman Strike, and the first Red Scare.
Violence was endemic in how the police handled these, and that is no longer the case.
The bonus march on Washington DC in 1932 was broken up with tanks against veterans!
Even the protests of the 1960s were handled with more violence then they are today.
Police brutality may be on the rise, but is nowhere close the level it has occupied in
American history.
But there is one other way of looking at violence that shows that violence is unquestionably
falling, but it is also maligned in the media as being on the rise.
Organized violence!
There are a few ways of looking at this though.
Gang-related crime is the first thing that comes to mind, but that has been on the decline
since the 1990s.
There are also historical examples of gang violence in the 19th century
that is far worse than anything we could look at post-WWII, such as the Hatfield-McCoy feud
and numerous specific, but famous small gangs, such as the wild bunch, Dalton gang, and Bugs
Moran’s gang.
The coal miner wars are also a good example here of old gang violence.
The violence of these went so far as to have aerial bombing take place in 1921, and that
by the miner gangs in Blair Mountain.
There’s another organized for of violence other than gangs though.
War is the biggest form of organized violence.
We’ve probably had more unnatural deaths in America because of war than because of
all murders, police killings, and organized violence combined.
That being said, out most bloody war was the Civil War, killing more than any of the other
declared wars combined.
Of course many of our wars have been very lopsided on the killing front.
From the current war in Afghanistan to Tecumseh’s War starting in 1811, there have been numerous
wars where the US has an asymmetric kill to death ratio in its favor.
So deaths can’t exactly count as violence either.
So the amount of wars is a good way to look to American violence then.
There is no time worse than the pre-WWI 20th century, especially thanks to the blundering
of Woodrow Wilson.
The frequency of wars have been getting better ever since.
You should check out my American small wars episode for more on the number of wars, but
suffice it to say, we have had significantly less wars in the 21st century than since,
despite the Global War on Terrorism beginning in 2001.
All of this goes to show that there is definitely less violence in America now then there has
been in the past.
Crime rates are down, police violence is probably down, organized violence is down, and war
is less frequent.
All of this happening, as I said before, while there are more Americans living than total
dead.
Perhaps we ought to change the timber of the conversation on American violence.
While almost all of the violence that does happen is unnecessary and stupid, we should
not portray it as something new and different, or even as something worse, because its not
in the slightest.
We live in extremely peaceful times, and this is coming from a combat veteran.
Despite fighting in Afghanistan, I know that I am less likely to experience violence in
America than at any other time in her history.
So thanks for watching.
Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe.
I especially would like to hear what you think on this subject.
I’ll see you next time.