Is there a relation between the places where the rate goes up the most: Midwest + cities of 50.000~500.000 and the areas that are the most hit by the current administration in terms of unemployment, enrollment etc ?
[WS:] I do not think this is the right question to ask of Archer's model. IIRC, he specifically rejects and individualistic connection (i.e. people who were involved in combat in one way or another are more prone to violence) for a collectivistic one. Specifically, he argues that the government decision to enter an armed conflict legitimizes the use of violence in general to solve differences of opinion, and that have a _generalized_ effect on the entire population, whether involved in war hostilities or not.
I think that an interesting twist on this argument is that it claims what TV executives always denied - the effect of media violence on actual violence. If Archer's argument holds, the glamorization of violence in the media has the similar effect - it legitimates violence in general population or its subsets and thus makes individuals more likely to use in conflict resolution.
My ex was Archer's RA during her days at UCSC and told me about some interesting comparative studies he did on violence. In one of them, he asked US and British high school students to complete stories that involved a conflict (IRRC, he used three scenarios - marital infidelity with either the wife or the husband caught cheating by the other spouse, and a demonstration connected to a labor dispute). What his material showed was that the Brits were more likely to supply endings that involved verbal arguments and negotiations, whereas the US-ers were more likely to supply endings involving gun violence.
Needless to say that this did not surprise me at all. I think that US-ers are not necessarily more violent than other nations in terms of engaging in actual physical acts of violence. They are more infatuated with *representations* of violence - i.e. they tend to be excited by displays - both symbolic and realistic - of violence and see it as a legitimate form of social interaction. I understand that the Japanese are also infatuated with displays of violence, but unlike the US, Japan has a very strict social rules that prohibit violence between members of its society, which explains the difference in homicide rates between the US and Japan (it would be interesting to hear more on it from someone more familiar with that culture.)
Wojtek