So are assault rates. But the general point is true: it is the pervasiveness of and infatuation with violence that is salient.
But that does not contradict my point that death penalty is a sacrificial ritual that symbolically re-establishes social order disrupted by crime. In fact, that would hold even if the US had the lowest crime rates in the entire industrialized world - all you need is the heightened visibility or salinece of the crimes that have been committed - e.g. in the media reports.
DP is gruesome as any act of killing - not less gruesome than, say, death by car or death by occupational hazard or death by Cruise missile - but its symbolic value (which I think is what attracts both proponents and detractors, lefties and assorted bleeding hearts and law and order demagogues, like flies to manure) aside, it is a minor and negligible cause of preventable deaths.
wojtek