American Homicide: 400-year study finds guns not the true cause of homicides
Review by C. Rodney James, PhD
AMERICAN HOMICIDE: A Historical Analysis of Murder from Colonial Times to the Present, by Randolph Roth, PhD. ©2009. Published by Belknap/Harvard University Press.,655 pages, hard cover. Price $45. Amazon.com lists a paperback edition for $22 and a Kindle edition for $36.
Ohio State University professor and historian Randolph Roth spent the past 25 years analyzing the question: Why does America have the highest homicide rate of contemporary, affluent, democratic nations? To this end he has charted the ebb and flow of American homicide over the past 400 years.
Roth was one of four historians selected by the prestigious William and Mary Quarterly to assess the scholarship of Emory U. Prof Michael A.
Bellesiles’ book, Arming America, now thoroughly discredited. In American Homicide, a complex but very readable book, Roth finds no links between gun ownership and crime. What he does find will surprise readers as he probes the roots of violence through painstaking statistical analysis.
“There is only one way to obtain reliable homicide estimates … to review every scrap of paper on criminal matters in every courthouse, every article in every issue of local newspapers, every entry in death records, and local history based on lost sources, local tradition, or oral testimony.” By these means homicide estimates produced are more extensive and reliable than court records alone, including those from The National Institutes of Health and the Department of Justice. Both suffer from under-reporting and related errors. Roth includes, “all deaths resulting from willful assaults … except those occurring in open warfare.” With more data, a clearer picture of overall as well as individual types of homicides is created, allowing researchers to determine which rise and fall together and which do not.
Difficulties arise calculating personal beliefs, social and political sentiments.
Statistical methods cannot do this, thus researchers must rely on diaries, speeches, op-ed newspaper columns, etc. Though historical data are geographically spotty, good data and largescale patterns emerge. That concurrent homicide fluctuations in New York City (heterogeneous), Williamson Co., IL (migrants from the Upper South) and Holmes Co., OH (Amish/ Mennonite) would occur by chance is (statistically) a near impossibility.
Roth emphasizes that statistical analysis cannot deal with multiple, simultaneous social changes. Those who claim validity for single-factor studies, e.g. The impact of gun laws, violent entertainment, poverty, drugs, alcohol, etc., on homicide rates, fail.
There are too many variables. One such notion is that recent relaxation of carrying concealed weapons has reduced the homicide rate by arming the law-abiding. Concealed weapons in California, during the 1850s, were responsible for a great many homicides.
Roth examines the circumstances— who carries weapons, why and the effect of improved medicine in reducing gunshot fatalities.
In assessing popular explanations for high homicide rates—frontier expansion, racial/ethnic/religious conflicts, Roth examines the issues of why some areas of the country that had been long settled have peaks in homicide equal to the rate in frontier areas. Why, for instance, when the homicide rate for Scots-Irish was declining in Ulster, were they killing at twice that rate in Virginia, and at half as much in New England? Race and slavery figure in the homicide equation, but not as many think. African-American homicide rates were lower than European whites prior to the 1890s but are higher today.
Answers to these and similar questions lie in the multiple causes of homicide. Only through an understanding of these can they be clearly understood.
Homicides among spouses, lovers, friends, families and business associates have different causes.
Homicides between co-workers and neighbors can often be explained by relations that verge on the personal/ familial.
Roth finds two variables correlating exactly with rate fluctuations—trust in government to do the right thing and belief that most public officials are honest. When these convictions fell, homicides went up.
A third element, Roth calls “fellow feeling,” the notion that we are in this together, is a strong deterrent to homicide. Its opposite—the “us vs.
them” mentality and beyond that the “me first” attitude—makes killing more acceptable. The breakdown of fellow feeling is generally concurrent with the loss of faith in government and its representatives.
The fourth element is loss of faith in the social hierarchy.
Unlike Bellesiles who led us to believe that the colonial period was a “peaceable kingdom,” Roth found guns and violence aplenty in the first 75-90 years of colonial America with some of the highest murder rates ever. Guns were the weapons of choice in semiwilderness/ rural America, while swords/daggers were the primary weapons in the crowded cities of Europe which were experiencing their own waves of killing. Handguns were few, too large to conceal, less accurate and less powerful than the musket— the weapon of choice that could use both shot and ball ammunition and was accurate enough to hit man-sized targets to 50 yards. Roth estimates 60% of all households contained a working firearm—useful for hunting, pest control, fighting hostile Indians, and other colonists; many of whom were ready to rob, rape, and murder with little provocation.
While firearm availability may have increased the fatality rate (mainly owing to poor/nonexistent medical care), Roth does not see guns as a cause.
In the 20th century, trust in government rose in the 1930s through the mid- 1960s. Homicide declined under presidents Roosevelt through Eisenhower who were perceived as working for the interests of all the people.
Since then, the disappearance of semiskilled and skilled jobs wiped out gains by union movements in the post-war era.
Young, unskilled, poorly-educated men turned to (often violent) crime. Civil unrest of the Vietnam Era was indicative of loss of faith in government and elected officials, while exacerbating personal feelings, returning to a “them vs. us” mentality as political assassinations and riots filled TV screens.
In the black community, militance replaced tolerance as real gains were washed away by poverty and de facto segregation. Protest became angry evolving into violent alienation.
White anger fueled protests against busing, affirmative action, quotas, and for “law and order” (writ large). As the war went badly, young whites engaged in crime and violence on the order of blacks.
Neither Ford nor Carter inspired increased faith in government. Ronald Reagan did during his first term. By the second, minorities felt left out.
Homicide increased. During the H.W.
Bush and Clinton administrations homicide inched up among militant whites, unhappy with higher taxes and Clinton’s liberal agenda. When Republicans gained the House, support for government increased, homicide declined. A situation that seemed to satisfy Americans was whenever there was government divided between Congress and the White House.
As America entered the 21st century homicide rose with scandals, intelligence failures regarding terrorist attacks, and open-ended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Government failures in Hurricane Katrina relief angered African Americans.
In facing the future, Roth offers no easy answers. Time and again he is emphatic that the importance of guns, while they facilitated murders, were/ are not the cause. Better law enforcement and surer justice can reduce homicide, but are not solutions.
Government from the political center has a definite mitigating effect on homicide.
Roth concludes that humans have the capacity for cooperation, kindness, empathy and tremendous industry and achievement. They also have an equal predilection for violence, hatred, intolerance, cruelty and destruction.
The publication of this study and continuing efforts to investigate the path of homicidal behavior make American Homicide the most important work of its kind to date. In addition to the 166 pages of notes, there is the quantitative supplement: The American Homicide Supplemental Volume (AHSV), online through the Historical Violence Database.
