By Joseph P. Tartaro | Executive Editor
The Chicago Herald and Examiner (now defunct) for Feb. 17, 1935 published a photo gallery of youthful criminals under the headline “Nation’s biggest criminal group—aged 20!”
“Every year the average age of our known criminals sinks lower and lower, until in this year of grace our LARGEST group is below the age which we constitutionally accept as the threshold of manhood; the AVERAGE age of ALL of our felons is under twenty-three,” the article continued.
Pictured in the full-page spread were two 12-year-old “bandit-killers,” a gambler-murderer also 12, one cop killer age 15 and another cop-killer age 18, various miscreants of ages 20 and under, including a 21-yer-old woman blackmailer-killer.
Earlier this year, about ten days after the Parkland, FL, school shooting, we stumbled across an old package of vintage yellowed newspaper clippings related to crime from sent some time ago by a reader in Lafayette, IN.
“The other day while going through some old papers at a friend’s house, I came across this page from the Chicago Herald and Examiner of Sunday, April 27, 1934.
“The story I thought had a bearing on today’s problems titled ‘Armed Underworld outnumbers sea and land forces 2 ty 1 says Cummings,’ who at that time was their Janet Reno and we can thank Attorney General Homer S. Cummings for the National Firearms Act,” the reader wrote.
“The whole rhetoric hasn’t changed much over the years. It would be interesting to share with your readers.”
The reporter forced Cummings to back up his claim and he listed the total of all Army, Navy and Marine personnel in 1933 as 241,570, with the number of armed thugs in the underworld at 557,591 based on police reports from most US cities as compiled by the Bureau of Criminal Investigation.
Accompanying the article, beside a 2-col. photo of Cummings, was a photo of long guns and handguns police allegedly found in the auto of the Barrows Brothers gang.
In that old mail packet were several other 1930s clippings.
In one, from the Chicago Daily Tribune of Thursday, April 9, 1931, a study by Frederick L. Hoffman, LL.D., is cited to report two important findings. The first that the homicide rate leaped from 9.9 per 100,000 population from 1919 to 10.9 in 1930, and the second that the death penalty was no deterrent to homicides. The story cited only two years when the homicide rate was higher: 11.2 in 1924 and 11.3 in 1925
In the second, from the Denver Post of Sunday, Aug. 2, 1931, the headline screamed “Juvenile crime on increase in America, says district judge.” With the subhead “62 percent of criminal sent to pen are under 25,” with the breaker head “Many of defendants are only a few months past 17: Judge Langston Kind of Houston, Tex.”
The old newspaper clippings are significant as they tend to remind us about keeping things, especially criminal justice history, in perspective. So let’s take a comparative look at some of the numbers.
Let’s start with total population: In 1930 the US population was 123,202,624, which came close to being tripled in 2017 when the US population was 323,148,586. By now it’s higher but I couldn’t find official numbers for October 2018 when this column was being written.
I did find figures from the FBI’s latest Uniform Crime Report which is covered in more detail in Dave Workman’s story on Page 3 of this issue. Simply put, Workman’s story reports that crime was down again for 2017 –down in all categories including homicides.
Now the Uniform Crime Report is a very comprehensive document, loaded with tables and charts, facts and figures. The one I noticed particularly was one that relates to the 1930s stories previously reported.
While times have changed, media reports have not really changed that much –just the media itself. Today we have more than newspapers, magazines and radio. We have television, wall-to-wall cable news channels and the Internet, which has a countless variety of news sources, some genuine and some “fake.”
What hasn’t changed in the media’s focus on crime in general and guns in particular, except perhaps today the media is a quite a bit more candid about its slant on guns and gun-related crime.
But I digress from my look at the latest Uniform Crime Report.
My point is that according to that FBI report the total US homicide rate in 2017 was 5.4 per 100,000 population, which is slightly more than half of what it was in 1930, and even lower in fractional comparison with 1919, the figures cited by the Chicago newspapers. Incidentally, the homicide rate in the US is far from the highest rate in the world.
The report also supplies homicide rates by population density, with different figure for the 30 largest cities, small city and suburban centers, rural towns reported separately. In some community groups, the homicide rate is as low as 2.4 per 100,000 people. In the biggest city group the rate is as high as 7.4. You can draw your own conclusions from the differences, especially with respect to Chicago, Los Angles, New York City or Baltimore.
So today’s media isn’t really focused on the declining national homicide rate, but they are missing something.
While the homicide rate was declining, the rate of gun ownership, and especially the rate of concealed carry licenses has increased enormously between the 1930s and 2017-18. Some figures place the number of concealed carry licenses in force now in the United States as 18 million; and that doesn’t count the 12 states that have legalized concealed carry without a license, nor New York, where nobody knows for sure how many valid carry licenses are in force. So 18 million may be a deceptive number!
The point is that crime keeps going down generally, with particular emphasis on a declining homicide rate, while the number of guns in the hands of law-abiding American citizens keeps going up.
My point is that there appears to be no correlation between violent crime and gun ownership by law abiding citizens. Perhaps some academics and media reporters should focus on the crime deterrent value of firearms ownership.
