Homicide rates

Courtesy of Freakonomics.

By now I'm sure we've all heard the familiar refrain that "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." That's the thought that immediately came to mind when I saw this graph in Steven Levitt's book Freakonomics. The graph (click on pic for larger image) shows homicide rates in various parts of Europe dating back to the 13th century (how accurate the record keeping was back then I have no idea).

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In every country we see a dramatic drop in murders over time. Belgium and the Netherlands saw their homicide rate plunge from 47.0 per 100,000 people in the 13th and 14th centuries to 5.5 in the 18th century to 0.9 in the second half of the 20th century. Germany and Switzerland experienced a similar drop from 37.0 to 7.5 to 1.0.

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What's really interesting is that England, Belgium and the Netherlands, and Germany and Switzerland all had lower homicide rates in the 17th century than the U.S. had as recently as 1990 (at nearly 10 per 100,000)! Yet, as far as I know, gun control did not take hold in Europe until the 20th century. The data, in my opinion, suggests that the reason behind the differing homicide rates in the U.S. and Europe isn't the number of guns, but the number of people willing to kill other people.

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Admittedly, I am hardly the first person to make this observation. As Thomas Sowell notes:

...The murder rate in New York City has been more than five times that of London for two centuries -- and during most of that time neither city had any gun control laws.

In 1911, New York state instituted one of the most severe gun control laws in the United States, while serious gun control laws did not begin in England until nearly a decade later. But New York City still continued to have far higher murder rates than London.

Perhaps the culprit is something ingrained in U.S. culture. What is this? And how do we go about changing it?