Looking for something else I stumbled on this edition of American Historical Review from February 2006 that addresses a theme that's come up here now and again. All of the articles mentioned here are available online:
>AHR Forum
>The Problem of American Homicide
>
>A high murder rate is the dark side of American "exceptionalism,"
>and historians, sociologists, and journalists are among those who
>have long pondered its causes. Why is it that people kill each other
>at a greater rate in the United States than in virtually any other
>nation, and certainly more than in any other advanced industrial
>society? An American historian who made this question his life's
>work was Eric Monkkonen, who died in June 2005. The final article in
>his long publishing career, which he was still working on at his
>death, forms the centerpiece of this forum on "The Problem of
>American Homicide." We are proud to be able to offer this summa of
>his views, a distillation of years of reflection and research, but
>we are saddened that we will no longer be hearing from a scholar
>whose thoughtfulness and commitment are apparent in this posthumous
>essay. His article is commented upon by two historians from very
>different perspectives. Elizabeth Dale, a legal historian, examines
>one of Monkkonen's claims, that American courts historically tended
>to deal leniently with homicide. She analyzes several cases from
>South Carolina in the early part of the nineteenth century to
>suggest explanations for this tendency. A historian of Europe,
>Pieter Spierenburg, takes issue with Monkkonen's dismissal of
>Norbert Elias's notion of the "civilizing process" as a factor in
>explaining differential homicide rates. For him, the key difference
>lies in America's robust and early democratic tradition, which
>represented an obstacle to the state's capacity to establish a
>monopoly on force and weaponry that European rulers managed to
>impose long before democracy took hold. Indeed, one implication of
>Spierenburg's own analysis is that it may be European, rather than
>American, exceptionalism that needs explaining.
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/111.1/