On 2012-12-18, at 4:38 PM, Dennis Claxton wrote:
> The murder rate in the U.S. has been high since the get go. Guns do not explain that.
The US has a history of widespread gun ownership not found, to my knowledge, in other capitalist states. Isn't this the crucial variable which does, in fact, explain its extraordinarily high historical murder rate? Otherwise, what does? The Europeans have had an equally violent past, but this has taken the form of imperialist conquest and wars between its rival powers as well as state-sponsored genocide rather than individual homicide on the same scale as in the US.