[lbo-talk] Marx without quotation marks

[WD]

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 7:08 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
> Philip Pilkington wrote:
>> Anyways, I mentioned a while ago in a different context that the extreme
>> manifestations of violence we see today (school shootings etc.)
>
> What evidence do you have that the level of violence is significantly
> greater now than (say) 70 years ago? Not anedotal evidence from
> headlines but hard data. This is an empirical question regarding
> comparison of distinct periods of time. I doubt very much byself that
> violence has increased in any significant way.

A little investigation with The Google yielded this:
http://www.census.gov/statab/hist/HS-23.pdf

There may well be methodological issues, but the FBI says that in 1960
the "violent" crime rate was 1887.2 per 100,000, whereas in 2002 the
violent crime rate was 4118.8 per 100,000.  The highest rate was
5950/100K in 1980.

So there's definitely an increase.  Personally, I found this rather surprising.

I know that scholars have tried to estimate the murder rate over the
course of several hundred years by examining medieval legal records
and found it to be way higher in earlier centuries.  Don't have any
cites though -- if anyone has any, I'd be very interested.

-WD