Can someone dig up the appropriate statistics on non-lethal assaults by weapon type? Then we can pull out that part of the change that is due to improved medical science/better ambulance coverage/etc turning murder victims into assault survivors.

Ben

My off-the-cuff observation would be that the violent '20s and '30s would coincide with prohibition and the Depression. The first event caused a boom in organized crime, and the second a wave of "disorganized crime" -- symbolized by the likes of Bonnie and Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd, but probably more widely attributable to high unemployment and homelessness. Mobilization for WWII, then, would likely have been what cooled things down.

Since the decline in violent crime of the '90s is often said to have been a product of the "graying" US population -- the aging of the baby boom cohort -- it might also be productive to look at the '20s and '30s data in parallel with age demographics.

I am wondering if the types of technologies employed today are more effective and efficient than those used 100 years ago. Firearms were certainly less "productive", and poisons were probably also harder to procure.

Also, folks have more wealth and income today than a hundred years ago. In 1907, Real GDP per capita was about $6,000 and now it is about $40,0000. So instruments of death are deflationary to the american consumer; more consumers can choose to purchase the instruments, even with increased gun control, just like more consumers have electricity, phones, indoor plumbing, cars, home equity, etc. today than ever before.

James Wilson wrote in the LAT, "[T]he non-gun homicide rate in this country is three times higher than the non-gun homicide rate in England."

Ben has a point, though, about improved ambulance and trauma care being a probably contributor to today's lower rate. The problem is that such care was not much worse in 1990 than today, and in 1990 was magnitudes better than in 1933.

OTOH, are firearms more lethal today due to weapons' higher ammunition capacity and greater lethality of ammo, I think.

Sounds like a good dissertation topic . . .

doesnt canada own more guns per capita and yet you dont see the kind of gun violence that you see in the states?

its not guns that kill ppl... its ppl who kill ppl...

I can't help but suspect that the homicide rate in the earlier portion of the measured period is understated, undercounting the murder rate among minorities.

And, particularly, it's crazy people who mass-murder. We absolutely need to have a national dialogue as a consequence of the tragedy at Virginia Tech but among the topics we need to discuss are the deinstitutionalization of the seriously mentally ill that took place roughly 40 years ago, reforms in commitment procedures, and the limited discretion afforded to public educational institutions in restricting attendance.

Re: deinstitutionalization see this op-ed in the WSJ.

I have three suspicions about the data:

One, the early data is probably less reliable since data accumulation has been an ongoing process of improvement of the bureaucratic state.

Two, the early data is less reliable in distinguishing murder versus natural or unexplained deaths because of improvements in the science of forensics.

Third, the early data probably under-counts minorities, and insular communities (religious and ethnic).

Caveat:

Winston Churchill at Omdurman used a Broomhandle Mauser which is functionally equivalent to a Glock 17. Autoloading pistols have been around since the 1880's and in commercial production since the 1890s.

The revolver dates back to the 1830's and the commercial availability of cartridge loading revolvers to the late 1850s. The double action revolver dates back to the 1870s.

So the basic technology has not changed much over more than a hundred years. Things on the margins have changed, somewhat better bullets, modern plastics, CAD design, titanium/scandium other exotic metals, but that's changes on the margins.

Dave Schuler:

The WSJ article on mental health issues seems to pass over important details. It says:

While it's been reported that he was involuntarily committed to a "Behavioral Health Center" in December 2005, those reports also say he was released the very next morning. Even if the will to segregate an obvious menace had been in place, the legal mechanisms to provide even temporary "warehousing" were absent. The rest is terrible history.

Cho was subject to a probable cause hearing in which it was determined that there was some reasonable evidence that he might harm himself sufficient to justify 24 hours of observation in an acute care facility. No mental health diagnosis was made.

The next day, the judge had the option to commit him if there was clear and convincing evidence that he would harm himself. That's nearly a criminal standard of proof, and all they appeared to have had was the concern of an acquaintance, and 24 hours of observation in which Cho denied suicidal thoughts and exhibited no visual or auditory hallucinations. What were they going to do, detain him until he admitted he had suicidal thoughts?

I’m very concerned about lowering the threshold of involuntary commitment here.

Then PD you can't have it both ways.

Choose either civil liberty absolutism and accept homelessness, abuse, violence, and guys like Cho running amok. Or sacrifice some civil liberties and reduce the above.

If you want civil liberties absolutism then you ought to support the end of "gun free" zones and shall-issue CCW. If you don't like this then you should support committing those who are nuts civil liberties fears be damned.

But IMHO you can't have it both ways.

Is there a slippery slope in involuntary commitment? Absolutely. But right now we can't even see the slope through a telescope.

One additional piece of data: Kleck (1997), Targeting Guns has the BATF figures on the civilian gun stock, Table 3.1, p 96. It shows a continuing increase from 1945 to 1994 (the table does not list estimates before 1945). Data from following years is not easily available from BATFE in a nice form, but the Manufacturers and Export Reports indicates that the number of guns in civilian hands continued to increase through 2005.

Some Say that the US violent crime rate can be attributed to too many guns. The usual marker for such violence is murders; the rate of murders goes up, it goes down, but the number of guns only goes up. The simple "too many guns" claim is not supported by the data. A more complex relationship may exist.

I don't want to go completely off thread, but I'm not sure that I am. If the issue of violence in America is not one that can be readily evaluated and sourced, then we should be skeptical of grand solutions derived from single occurrences. I've seen no evidence that Cho should have been committed. (Perhaps the school should have expelled him or refused future admittance, but I would like to read more).

Jim: You offer a false dichotomy between civil rights absolutism and a balanced approach. There is also such thing as a security state. I simply don't think depression, the accusation of suicidal thoughts by an acquaintance, or being a jerk should be enough to merit losing one's freedoms. Part of the problem is if the bar to commitment is lowered too drastically, people who need help will become more reluctant to seek it.

Its probably worth pointing out that the deadliest school-related killings in U.S. history were in 1927.

#11 from PD Shaw: "I�m very concerned about lowering the threshold of involuntary commitment here."

I share that concern.

The bum wasn't extraordinarily nutty, rather he chose to perform extraordinarily evil and harmful acts.

To try to prevent future killings by locking up everybody who seems to be as flaky as the latest killer or more so, you'd have to lock away hordes of people.

Have you read American Psycho and The Female Eunuch? Then there is as much evidence that you are crazy as there was that Wade Frankum was crazy before he did the Strathfield massacre. (Seven dead.)

It's a bad idea to aim at a less violent idea by grabbing and locking away everybody that somebody with authority thinks may become violent.

An authority figure who thought like Mr. Howard Meek (link) might decide that the potentially violent person is you. He would be likely to do so if you were a gun owner and he had the power to have you shut away or shot for disobeying an order.

"What about a mandatory death sentence for anyone commiting a crime with a gun? Bet that would slow it down. And let police shoot anyone who disobeys one of their orders — not to kill but at least to stop their disobedience. Overreaction? Yes, but necessary because of the society we have become."

I think the idea is essentially the same. There is a cry that things are getting worse. (Only where is the hard evidence?) There is fury, and strong desire arbitrarily to punish lots of people. So, arbitrary shooting, arbitrary imprisonment and perhaps other penalties are seen as good. Whoever has this idea things that those not on the same wavelength with them has violence in them, so: Get them! Shoot them!! Lock them all away!!!

There is deep disagreement on what counts as violence.

Do the activities of Dr. Harold Frederick Shipman, the most prolific serial killer in English history, count as violence? He killed hundreds of patients, elderly women otherwise in good health, because he wanted to. There was no resistance. Is that violence?

Is involuntary euthanasia violence? If not, why not?

If the reason that euthanasia is not violent (and the physically identical acts performed by Doctor Shipman are violent) is that what he did was against the law, while euthanasia may be legal, remember that in every debate over euthanasia, one argument, grimly plausible, is that doctors are doing this all the time anyway, so we should make it legal.

Is the issue resistance? Then a lot of the killing at Virgina Tech was non-violent.

Is the issue noise? Then would abortion be violent or non-violent, depending on whether you clapped the pages of a book together loudly each time you killed a fetus?

In Violence And Society In The Early Medieval West (edited by Guy Halsall, the Boydell Press, 1998), there is a remarkable final (11th) chapter by Nancy L. Wicker: Selective female infanticide as partial explanation for the dearth of women in Viking Age Scandinavia. I think it ought to drive home to anyone who reads it that chronic killing can have major consequences, and these consequences are not at all lessened if the victims have no voices and no hope of resistance.

If you murder a million babies, perfectly legally (if infanticide to avoid dowry costs is legal), and you stifle every cry and hurl the bodies in the sea, never to be found, they are still dead, and this is still violence, with all the consequences of killing. (For your population structure, for female adult bodies in graves or the remarkable lack thereof, perhaps for a need for young men to go elsewhere to grab themselves women, and so on.)

People are persistently unwilling to recognize that killing can be "violence" if they are for it, and if it's safe, easy (for the killers and those who hire them), quiet and so on. But it's still true. Dead is dead.

In fact, from 1870-1910 the murder rate hovered around 1/100K!

And yet that was the era of legendary American gun violence, From Dodge City to Tombstone.

Many American towns had gun control ordinances during that time. The real gun control, though, came from the men like James Butler Hickock, the Earps and the Mastersons, who ruled the Kansas cow towns by threatening to kill people who got out of line. Even if their prowess was more reputation than fact, it was very effective all the same.

Those murder figures have to be suspect, though. Murders in the territories were often not described as such. Towns like Deadwood had no legal authority at all and were not even technically part of the United States. Juries tended to acquit people unless they had something against them personally.

> Firearms were certainly less "productive", and poisons were probably also harder to procure. [100 years ago]

Not in this universe. Strychnine and others were readily available - just try buying them today. Opiates were over the counter.

The regulatory state basically didn't exist 100 years ago.

FWIW - Guns/person is changing faster than the fraction of the population that has guns.

It's tough to argue with her question as an independent question because of it's form, though I still like to know if there weren't similar 'mass murders', albeit of a lesser nature, "like today".

I say argue, because the ones today have a different flavor to the motives than the ones of yesteryear. We had all sorts of mass murders dotting history I'm sure. To put a point on it, I googled Columbine to mark the number of deaths there just as a figurative limit to qualitfy for mass murder, rather than just say five dead. In 1927, Andrew Kehoe blew up the Bath Consolidated School, which killed 45 people and injured 58.

Again, how many were murdered at the St. Valentine's Day massacre? Umbriel has already noted one genre that might constitute mass murders, though the Floyd's Barkers, Barrows, and Capones tended to stretch them over longer periods of time than a half-hour or hour. The same might be said for the Klu Klux Klan. If we at least consider these before throwing them out, we might find that technology linked at the hip with better police enforcement has weeded these genres from society, leaving only the solo actors.

As for the rise in solo actors, couldn't it be said that this might have been expected? Apparently, in the thirties, these nut cases had an outlet for their penchants, such as in the groups noted. Over the years, society has chipped away at these outlets for many reasons and by many methods. One we keep working on vigorously, reminds me of Ben Franklin's old saying "Three people can keep a secret, if two of them are dead." It is that one keeping the secret that is the hardest to control or co-opt when it comes to mass murder, so it's not that this genre has arisen to the top so much as it has been boiled down to the only genre left for those misfits and nut jobs to act on.

Its just that today's Lame Stream Media makes any local event a national one in seconds. Then you have the talking heads swarming the site for all follow on events, commentaries, opinions, etc., ad infinitum, ad naseum until over saturation has occured. And, of course, self styled "experts" weigh in with even more speculation as to why. In the mean time, the root cause, in this case the school's gun free campus policy, gets ignored for the more sensational cause.

Simply comparing these rates across time means nothing. This is bad science.

First off, as someone up thread noted, we would have to calculate a factor by which to multiply the annual murder rate to adjust for for age and sex factors. For example it is well known that young males are far more likely to commit murder than other groups. Not being a criminologist I am not sure what other adjusters would have to be included, but other possibilities would include socio-economic adjusters, ethnicity adjusters, etc.

Another important point that cannotbe ignored is that modern medicine is vastly superior to that available to past generations when it comes to saving the lives of trauma victims. Also, modern transportation and communication play an important role is saving lives. So I suspect that our murder rate today would be significantly higher than past rates if one accounted for - and adjusted for - the impact of modern life saving technologies on current murder rates.

Since many people that died and were counted as a murder in the '20s and '30s would today be saved and not counted as a murder, maybe a better measure of societal violence would be the murder rate + the attempted murder rate. Until you look at something like this you can't comment or draw conclusions about relative violence across decades.

Again, I suspect that with attemptedmurder included, we would see todays society as being far moreviolent than the past. And much of that violence being attributable to handgun use.