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The theme music from "Deliverance" is running through my head. FWIW this part of the US has been giving the Khyber Pass region of India a run for its money as the most violent place on the planet. These places have a lot in common: Abject poverty for most, family blood feuds, and a cultural bias that violent men are strong men.
The violent men were strong men only applies when using knives, stones, swords and clubs. After the rifle was invented the strongest, meanest most violent Sampson could be taken out at 300 yards by a 98 pound weakling with an Enfield rifle and perfect sight. That still applies to both places.
Most of Chicago's housing projects have been torn down. I figured you lived in some sort of low-density, suburban environment.
The point is that in an environment where there is alot of hopelessness, drugs, anger, and people are living on top of each other, it can cause more problems.
I think that article may be off. Using the federal government's statistics...we will not drop lower than the murder rates of the 1950s. I wish we would.
We are looking at a murder rate of ~4.8 for 2012....not quite the murder rates of 4.0 to 4.2 through much of the mid 1950s.
I think that article may be off. Using the federal government's statistics...we will not drop lower than the murder rates of the 1950s. I wish we would.
We are looking at a murder rate of ~4.8 for 2012....not quite the murder rates of 4.0 to 4.2 through much of the mid 1950s.
Even so, the murder rate is much lower now than it was in the 1970s and 80s.
More interesting is this. Trauma medicine technology has advanced since the 1950s. If one was to get shot in the 1950s, one was more likely to die. Today, there is a higher chance of surviving a gunshot. And the irony was that in the 1950s, it was easy to get a gun. It has become harder to get a gun. However, it hasn't stopped people from getting shot.
There was a researcher (I think from University of Michigan) that looked into the violence that differed among whites in the US. He came to a theory of a 'culture of honor'. Basically it was that the people that tended to inhabit the South and Appalachians had a high proportion of ancestors from places like Southern Scotland and Northern England where feuds and revenge killings (for tarnishing someone's honor) have been accepted for centuries. When they got to the US they maintained this attitude and carry it even to today. In some of the studies, he would check testosterone and cortisol from students all around the country and all economic classes, then do things to irritate them and recheck hormones. The southern students would tend to have higher increases in hormones when triggered and get more aggressive. What caught the researcher's attention was that he noticed higher murder rates in the south, yet other crime was way lower than in other regions (few muggings and theft compared to the Northeast for example). He basically said that the south/Appalachians were friendlier and safer than other areas unless you went and picked a fight or committed adultery--in those cases it is likely to be very violent and in many cases result in death. I read it a while back and thought it interesting, don't know how well it was peer reviewed.
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