Modern homicide

It's interesting to note that the homicide rate in Australia continues to fall, as it is apparently is internationally.  But the comparison with the US is still remarkable:

The Australian Institute of Criminology has released a report examining the 510 homicides across the country over 24 months between July 2008 and June 2010.

It found that the rate of homicide in Australia remains at a historic low of 1.2 deaths per 100,000 people.

The NSW rate was just below that at 1.1 per cent per 100,000, Victoria recorded the lowest while the Northern Territory rate was more than four times the national average.

Indigenous Australians were over-represented as victims of homicide, with the homicide rate four times higher than the equivalent rate for non-indigenous Australians.

Gun-related homicide dropped to a historic low of 13 per cent but the frequency of people dying from stab wounds jumped from 30 per cent to 41 per cent over the previous decade.

In the US, in the meantime:

 The national homicide rate for 2011 was 4.8 per 100,000 citizens — less than half of what it was in the early years of the Great Depression, when it peaked before falling precipitously before World War II. The peak in modern times of 10.2 was in 1980, as recorded by national criminal statistics.

“We’re at as low a place as we’ve been in the past 100 years,” says Randolph Roth, professor of history at Ohio State University and author of this year’s “American Homicide,” a landmark study of the history of killing in the United States. “The rate oscillates between about 5 and 9 [per 100,000], sometimes a little higher or lower, and we’re right at the bottom end of that oscillation.”

Well, isn't that fascinating:  the US is (so to speak) doing cartwheels over a historically low murder rate which is still 4 times higher than ours.   And this would seemingly mean that you can't blame all of America's current rate on the drug trade (or, in the past, on prohibition) - there have been decades in which neither of these factors were significant, the country still had a relatively high murder rate.

So, what's the theory of Roth, who is quoted above.   Here's the summary of his book on Amazon:

 In American Homicide, Randolph Roth charts changes in the character and incidence of homicide in the U.S. from colonial times to the present. Roth argues that the United States is distinctive in its level of violence among unrelated adults—friends, acquaintances, and strangers. America was extraordinarily homicidal in the mid-seventeenth century, but it became relatively non-homicidal by the mid-eighteenth century, even in the slave South; and by the early nineteenth century, rates in the North and the mountain South were extremely low. But the homicide rate rose substantially among unrelated adults in the slave South after the American Revolution; and it skyrocketed across the United States from the late 1840s through the mid-1870s, while rates in most other Western nations held steady or fell. That surge—and all subsequent increases in the homicide rate—correlated closely with four distinct phenomena: political instability; a loss of government legitimacy; a loss of fellow-feeling among members of society caused by racial, religious, or political antagonism; and a loss of faith in the social hierarchy. Those four factors, Roth argues, best explain why homicide rates have gone up and down in the United States and in other Western nations over the past four centuries, and why the United States is today the most homicidal affluent nation.

I see that the book has just been was released a year ago.  Sounds like it could be a good read.